The U.S. has the unfortunate distinction of being the only major tourist destination that saw a decline in visitors in 2025, and it looks like that trend will continue into 2026, according to a new report.
Tourism grew worldwide in 2025, but the U.S. saw a 6 percent drop last year, according to data from the World Travel and Tourism Council.
January’s tourism numbers didn’t provide a rosy outlook for the rest of the year. Visitors to the States continued to decline, down 4.8 percent from January 2025.
Visitors from Canada — the second-largest source of U.S. tourism after Mexico — were down by 28 percent in January when compared to January 2024, the New York Times reports. Canadian travel to the U.S. has declined to the point where WestJet, a Canadian airline, has cut its summer flights to numerous U.S. destinations, and Montreal-based airline Air Transat announced that it would stop operating flights to Florida this summer.
Overseas visitors from Germany and France also declined, though visitors from Britain increased slightly by 0.5 percent.
Airline bookings from Europe to the U.S. for the peak summer travel months are down more than 14 percent year-over-year, according to Forbes, citing aviation analytics company Cirium.
The drop in tourism comes with a steep cost to the U.S. travel industry.
“When 11 million international visitors aren’t showing up, the result is billions of dollars in economic losses to the travel industry,” Erik Hansen, a senior vice president at the U.S. Travel Association, told the Times.
The primary roadblock to American tourism appears to be President Donald Trump. His administration has barred visitors from more than a dozen countries, introduced a $250 “visa integrity fee” for nonimmigrant tourists, made visiting the nation’s national parks more expensive for anyone visiting from out of the country, and is subjecting visitors to increasingly invasive searches at points of entry and probes into their personal lives — up to five years’ worth of social media history — during visa application processes.
The World Travel and Tourism Council estimates that the loss to U.S. tourism from changes made during the Trump administration could reach $15.7 billion.
The Trump administration has been sending a mixed message to those who might want to visit the U.S. While the president has insisted he is welcoming visitors to the U.S. for the nation’s 250th anniversary and the World Cup — which will be hosted by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico — he has also been overtly aggressive toward Greenland and Canada and, as noted, has outright banned visitors from dozens of nations.
The World Cup could help turn around the U.S.’s tourist slump, but a forecast from Oxford Economics suggests even the massively popular soccer championship may not be enough to reverse the trend.
The firm is predicting only 3.9 percent growth in incoming international travel, meaning the U.S. would still be down overall since the beginning of Trump’s second term.
“Ongoing policy uncertainty and enforcement actions from the Trump administration are likely to limit gains, leaving the U.S. at risk of underperforming other international destination markets again this year,” the firm said in a statement to the Times.
