Olja Ivanic looked forward to welcoming some cousins from Sweden to her Denver home in June. Ivanic and the four travelers were planning to go hiking in Colorado and then visit Los Angeles and San Francisco.
But then President Donald Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a February meeting at the White House. Ivanic’s four relatives immediately canceled their scheduled trip and decided to vacation in Europe instead.
“The way (Trump) treated a democratic president that’s in a war was beyond comprehensible to them,” said Ivanic, who is the U.S. CEO of Austria-based health startup Longevity Labs.
The U.S. tourism industry expected 2025 to be another good year in terms of foreign travelers. The number of international visitors to the United States jumped in 2024, and some forecasts predicted arrivals from abroad this year would reach pre-COVID levels.
But three months into the year, international arrivals are plummeting. Angered by Trumps’ tariffs and rhetoric, and alarmed by reports of tourists being arrested at the border, some citizens of other countries are staying away from the U.S. and choosing to travel elsewhere.
The federal government’s National Travel and Tourism Office released preliminary figures Tuesday showing visits to the U.S. from overseas fell 11.6% in March compared to the same month last year. The figures did not include arrivals from Canada, which is scheduled to report tourism data later this week, or land crossings from Mexico. But air travel from Mexico dropped 23%.
For the January-March period, 7.1 million visitors entered the U.S. from overseas, 3.3% fewer than during the first three months of 2024.
The travel forecasting company Tourism Economics, which as recently as December anticipated the U.S. would have nearly 9% more international arrivals this year, revised its annual outlook last week to predict a 9.4% decline.
Tourism Economics expects some of the steepest declines will be from Canada, where Trump’s repeated suggestion that the country should become the 51st state and tariffs on close trading partners have angered residents. Canada was the largest source of visitors to the U.S. in 2024, with more than 20.2 million, according to U.S. government data.
Flight Centre Travel Group Canada, a travel booking site, said leisure bookings to U.S. destinations were down 40% in March compared to the same month a year ago. Air Canada has reduced its schedule of spring flights to Florida, Las Vegas and Arizona due to lack of demand.
The National Travel and Tourism Office gave a rosier forecast last month for international travel to the U.S. Based on 2024 travel patterns, the office said it expected arrivals to increase 6.5% to 77.1 million this year and surpass 2019 levels in 2026.
But Tourism Economics said the impact of the less favorable view of the U.S. from abroad could be severe enough that international visits won’t surpass pre-pandemic levels until 2029.
“The survey data is all indicating a significant mix of cancellations and a massive drop in intent to travel,” Tourism Economics President Adam Sacks said.
Ian Urquhart, a professor emeritus at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, was supposed to go to Las Vegas for five days in June and see Coldplay in concert. He canceled the trip to protest Trump’s “incredibly disparaging tone” toward Canada even though it meant losing a $500 deposit on the vacation package.
His oldest daughter similarly nixed a planned May trip to Sedona, Arizona, while his brother-in-law decided not to go on his usual weeklong golf trip to Scottsdale, Arizona, according to Urquhart.
“None of us jumped for joy when we made those decisions, but it seemed to be one of the few ways we could signal how we felt about the bullying that has been directed towards Canada by your president,” Urquhart said.
For Pepa Cuevas and her husband, who live in Madrid, Trump’s election in November was a turning point. The couple had planned to spend a month skiing in Colorado over the winter holidays. They went to Japan instead.
“Trump’s victory left us, especially me, very shocked,” Cuevas said. “For the moment, we have lost the desire to return. I don’t know what will happen in the future, but for the moment we are still shocked, and it doesn’t look like this is going to be resolved.”
According to the government data released Tuesday, international arrivals from China were down nearly 1%. Leisure trips by Chinese citizens to places like Disneyland, Hawaii and New York are decreasing dramatically and likely won’t pick up again until Trump has left office, said Wolfgang Georg Arlt, the CEO of the China Outbound Tourism Research Institute. He dubs it the “Trump Slump.”
That slump has financial consequences. Tourism Economics expects U.S. spending by international visitors to drop by $9 billion this year.
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