If you are a part of the inbound U.S. travel and tourism industry and you have survived the first half of 2020 then, in the words of the Artful Dodger in “Oliver,” the stage play and movie, “Consider yourself at home; Consider yourself one of the family.” As measured by the number of inbound arrivals from overseas source markets, you have made it through the worst quarter in the history of the record-keeping by the U.S. National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO) or its predecessor organizations.
The Q2 downturn in business officially started in the second part of March 2020 as nations began banning international travel, in most cases, to and from their borders. Now that a number of countries have nervously opened up to international travel and airline lift capacity is now nearing half of what it was before the coronavirus-driven global pandemic hit the travel and tourism industry.
One can massage the data in any variety of ways, but the obvious keeps coming back, no matter what numbers one deploys. Consider these, for instance: June 2020 arrivals from the UK to the USA totaled 1,905—down from 381,000 for June 2019. Year-to-date (through June), the UK has sent 701,000 visitors to the U.S., a decrease of 68 percent from the 2.2 million arrivals for the same period last year. For all overseas travel to the USA, there were 39.5 thousand arrivals last month, compared to 3.5 million for June 2019, and there 6.2 million YTD arrivals for the first six months of 2020, compared to 18.9 million for the same six months of 2019.
The rest of the basic statistical portrait for inbound travel for June 2020 and for the first half of the year follows.
