Unless there is a major turnaround in the damage to visitation from the overseas markets of China and Brazil which is expected to be major, it is likely that Germany will begin 2021 as the Number 4 overseas source market for inbound tourism to the United States.
However, what the recent behavior of the market seems to tell us is that one won’t see dramatic shifts upward, nor will it experience a significant decline, either. A quick review of the information made available in the latest market profile for Germany released by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO) suggests that there is likely not to be much variation of travel to the U.S.
In fact, the number of visitors from German to the United States in 2019 was almost exactly the same as it was six years ago in 2014. The count was 2,064 last year, while it was 2,074 in 2014. The “sameness” has prevailed in what Germans like to do when the visit the United States. For the five-year period of 2015 through 2019, the top three activities of German visitors to America are the same: shopping, sightseeing and visiting national parks.
There are some shifts in activities and or in the purpose of their trip, but you have to look for nuances and what they mean if you are selling the German market.
So, in sum, do not expect much of a change of any sort in this market. And in the context of the mess that 2020 is, “not much of a change” will serve us well if we can get back to “more of the same” in 2021. Following are some selected tables from the NTTO market profile which, in some cases, we have slightly reformatted.
Notes on NTTO material: Only country and world region destinations having a sample size consistently of 100 or more are displayed. Visitation incidence was rounded to two decimal places in NTTO source files beginning in 2014 to reduce artificial ‘jumpiness’ in the data caused by rounding to only one decimal places, especially for destinations having incidence of less than two percentage points. Due to quarterly data weighting by country and port of entry, some unreported destinations may have a higher proportion of total than those reported.
For additional information, visit https://travel.trade.gov/
