It could be worse. While not good news in itself, arrivals total for November is the lowest of the monthly declines its experienced since March 2020.
Toward the latter part of next month, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO) will release the final, monthly, “quick-release” with the arrivals numbers for the Top 15 source markets for overseas visits to the United States for 2020. In 2019, the Top 15 accounted for close to 70 percent of all overseas arrivals to the U.S.
There will be other 2020 tallies from NTTO in the following months, but they will not change the assessment that the November data below already show us: This has indeed been the worst year for overseas travel to the United States since NTTO and its predecessor federal agencies have collected the information.
It would be irresponsible to make any authoritative generalizations about the numbers below, given their isolated nature, but one can still speculate. As one pollster put it years ago, when he explained his practice in reviewing the raw numbers from a survey: “Study the numbers. Study them thoroughly. After a while, they begin to talk to you.”
With that as a preface, we urge you to review the tables below.
