While it should be noted up front that first quarter results on outbound travel from Europe are not a reliable barometer for what to expect for a whole calendar year, the results on Q1 U.S. international inbound tourism to the U.S. recently released by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO) are not encouraging reading, as they tend to confirm what international and U.S.-based receptive tour operators were telling INBOUND during IPW earlier this month: Europe is experiencing some “soft spots,” China is down, and Argentina has cratered.
Moreover, the sluggish performance of the international inbound market for Q1 may not be an anomaly for all of 2019. While the U.S. Travel Association has released an April 2019 Travel Trends Index which showed that international inbound traffic expanded 5.6 percent in April, rallying after two months of contraction, US Travel’s Leading Travel Index (LTI) continues to project that “inbound travel growth will be positive, albeit slower, over the next six months, registering at or just below 1.0 percent.”
Below are the tables showing the performance of the top inbound markets for the United States for the first quarter of 2019.
