The just-released United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) has positioned the United States at Number 3 among international tourist destinations, having been overtaken as Number 2 by Spain. The UNWTO had projected such a change in rank nine months ago.
The change in the position of the USA on the world’s Top 10 International Tourist Destinations reflects a real decline in visitors to the United States, as well as a decline in global market share-continuing a downward trend that has been in place for a decade or so.
Not noted in the UNWTO numbers was a confirmation, of a sort, of the last forecast of total U.S. international inbound traffic by the U.S. National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO). The just-released UNWTO figure put international arrivals to the U.S. for 2017 at 75.9 million. Last January, NTTO projected a total of 75.1 million international visitors to the United States once final data for 2017 were complete. (However, NTTO last April announced that it was suspending the release of arrivals data due to some technical problems with the way arrivals numbers were being tallied and reported to the agency.) The closeness of the two numbers suggest that NTTO is not far off the mark—even with a projection that relied on faulty data.
Hi Tom, to what do you attribute the downturn to? It can’t be only economic and increased security factors. It’s been a while since I’ve been overseas talking to operators, so unsure of what their customers are saying. Is there still a negative sentiment about traveling to the US, or are other countries just doing a better job selling their destinations?
There are several factors that contribute to the fall of the U.S. to third place from second place among the world’s top country destinations. They include these:
1. Traffic from Canada, the top international inbound visitor market for the U.S., was still down about a half million visitors from what it was in 2015.
2. Traffic from Mexico, the second largest market for international inbound visitation to the U.S. was down by more than a million visitors in 2017 vs. 2016, largely because of a decline in the value of the Mexican peso vs. the U.S. dollar.
3. Spain benefitted from a surge in short-haul visitors from other places in Europe who had forgone travel to places such as North Africa and Turkey in the wake of terrorist attacks in those regions.
4. The strong U.S. dollar vs. both the British pound sterling and the euro put a lid on higher visitation numbers from the UK and the Eurozone, where the number of visitors in 2017 would have been higher.
There may be other factors, such as the unpopularity in some countries of President Trump, but not enough to have a significant measurable impact on visitor numbers as do the factors cited above.