Tourist Boycott of the USA is serious
MY OPINION PIECE IN THE BOSTON GLOBE
Tourists have a message for Trump: We’re boycotting the US
There is easy irony in this tourist backlash. Trump, who is a titan of the resort and tourism industry, has stoked resistance by breaking the first rule of tourism: create an alluring and welcoming destination.
By Elizabeth BeckerUpdated April 12, 2025, 3:00 a.m.
Elizabeth Becker is the author of five books, including “OVERBOOKED: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism.”
The most serious resistance to President Trump’s America First assault on the world order has come from an unexpected source: tourists.
Trump’s insults and bullying, his economic warfare waged with questionable tariffs, his imperial claims on other nations, and his disrespect for law and order have ignited a spontaneous tourist boycott of the United States, upending America’s tourism business at a cost of $22 billion.
There is easy irony in this tourist backlash. Trump, who is a titan of the resort and tourism industry, has stoked resistance by breaking the first rule of tourism: create an alluring and welcoming destination.
Instead, Trump has made it clear to Canadians and Europeans that they are no longer America’s close friends and allies. He threatened their economies with tariffs because he claimed the United States was being ripped off by current trade agreements.
His immigration order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” painted Mexico and Canada as virtual enemies allowing drugs and immigrants to pass freely through their borders. He claimed an imperial right to Greenland, the Panama Canal, and Canada, which he said should be the 51st state. He belittled European nations as unnecessary freeloaders as he abandoned long-held commitments and switched the US stance to support Russia against Ukraine.
Not surprisingly, Canadians and Europeans, the people whose governments Trump treated with such contempt, are the core of the informal boycott. They are also citizens of the countries that most tourists to the United States visit from. Number one is Canada, followed by Mexico, the United Kingdom, and Germany. France is number eight. Together they accounted for 40 million of the 66 million visitors to the United States last year.
This will hurt the US economy. Tourism is a major American industry. It is the seventh-largest employer and contributed $2.36 trillion to the economy in 2023, more than agriculture or the automobile industry. But tourism is also sensitive to cultural and political shifts.
Travel choices are influenced by countless advertisements for the latest “best places to go” and photographs that flood Instagram and TikTok. The reason the United States earned more money from tourism last year than any other country was its openness, culture, and diversity of landscape and experience. That America is disappearing. And so are tourists.
“Why would you come to the United States today?” said Randy Durband, the CEO of Global Sustainable Tourism Council, a nonprofit that sets tourism standards around the world, in an interview. “Travel is a feeling. You want to go someplace where you feel good and comfortable and safe. That’s not America now and people get that. They have plenty of other choices.”
They are going elsewhere. Tourism Economics predicts that the United States will suffer a 12 percent reduction in inbound foreign travel. That is based on early days of the boycott. In February, Canadian road trips to the United States dropped 23 percent, leisure bookings dropped 40 percent, and by the end of March airline bookings dropped 75 percent. The outlook calls for a “considerable decline.
What was supposed to be another outstanding year for tourism is becoming a disappointment. The National Travel and Tourism Office reported last week that visits to the United States fell 11.6 percent in March compared to the same period last year and that figure did not include the steep drop in Canadian travelers.
The drop in European travel accelerated when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, acting with impunity, detained or deported Europeans and Canadians. Each deportation and detention was headline news for its trampling on rights and the law. The French scientist turned away in Houston because he had criticized Trump on social media. Three members of a British rock group refused entry at the Los Angeles airport, allegedly for the same reason. A Canadian actress put in chains and jailed for 12 days when applying for a visa. A German man arrested at Logan Airport and violently interrogated and jailed in Rhode Island.
Incensed, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France issued warnings about travel to the United States. Mexico issued a travel warning about Texas due to the measles outbreak. This swift slide of the United States from favorite to feared destination is hard to exaggerate.
And that fear works both ways. Shannon Stowell, the CEO of Adventure Travel and Tourism Association, warned members that “Americans are increasingly hesitant to travel, concerned about how they may be received abroad, regardless of their political views.”
Trump will add to the boycott himself when he releases his list of countries whose citizens will be banned from receiving visas to the United States. The preliminary list of 43 countries was hard to decipher. Bhutan, the peaceful Himalayan nation and tourism magnet, is one of the first to be banned.
Domestic travel won’t make up for the loss in foreign tourism because Americans are postponing or canceling trips in their own country. They are worried about the economy in general and the effect of Trump’s drastic cuts and firings on their travel plans, especially at national parks, which are facing diminished staffing and resources.
With reduced American traveling and the growing foreign tourist boycott, the US travel industry will lose $64 billion in 2025, according to the latest projections of Tourism Economics.
That’s the financial cost. The social damage is impossible to calculate. Travel to new lands for new experiences and new understanding of other people and cultures will be lost, leading to insularity and fear of the stranger in Fortress America. Or as Mark Twain famously said: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow mindedness.”