America has rarely suffered from a shortage of things worth seeing.
New York’s swagger, California sunshine, Florida’s theme-park empires, Hawaii’s beaches, Alaska’s wilderness, Las Vegas in all its neon glory, and national parks capable of making even the most dedicated smartphone addict briefly look up.
Yet for the United States tourism industry, an uncomfortable question is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
Where have some of the international visitors gone?
The answer is more complicated than saying foreigners have simply stopped travelling to America. They have not.
The latest figures reveal something more subtle and arguably more important.
The United States is confronting an uneven international tourism slowdown, with particularly significant weakness in overseas markets, Canada and Western Europe, even as Mexico and South America provide brighter spots.
Tourism Economics reported on 21 September 2026 that overseas arrivals to the United States were down 5.8 per cent year-to-date through August, with recent results weaker than previously expected. Western European arrivals were down 8.8 per cent, while Canadian visitation remained well below recent historical levels.
Mexico, however, is heading in the opposite direction. Mexican arrivals increased 14.6 per cent year-to-date through June, while arrivals from South America were up 3.8 per cent through August.
So this is not an obituary for American tourism.
It is a warning about America’s ability to capture its expected share of an expanding global travel market.
America remains the tourism giant
Any suggestion that the United States has suddenly stopped being a tourism powerhouse is nonsense.
The World Travel & Tourism Council reported that Travel & Tourism generated approximately US$2.63 trillion in US economic activity during 2025, keeping the United States the world’s largest Travel & Tourism economy.
The sector supported approximately 20.4 million American jobs. Domestic visitor spending remained formidable at about US$1.54 trillion.
But a considerable blemish marred those otherwise impressive figures.
WTTC says international visitor numbers to the US fell 5.5 per cent in 2025 compared with 2024, while international visitor spending dropped 4.6 per cent to US$176 billion.
For a country operating tourism on this scale, even modest percentage declines translate into very large numbers.
And international travellers are particularly valuable customers.
U.S. Travel Association figures indicate overseas visitors spend approximately US$4,000 per trip, around eight times more than a domestic traveller. International visitors supported nearly one million American jobs in 2025.
When these travellers disappear from the arrivals hall, the consequences do not stop at immigration.
Hotels lose nights. Restaurants lose covers. Attractions lose admissions. Retailers lose shoppers. Airlines, tour companies, casinos, rental-car companies, convention centres, and local transport operators all feel the effect.
International tourism is, after all, an export business in which the customer kindly travels thousands of kilometres to collect the product personally.
The world is still travelling
Perhaps the most significant part of America’s problem is that global travellers have not collectively decided to stay home.
Quite the opposite.
WTTC says international visitor spending worldwide reached a record US$2.02 trillion in 2025, increasing 3.2 per cent year-on-year and moving above pre-pandemic levels.
In other words, the global international tourism market is growing while the US has recently been losing international momentum.
Tourism Economics estimates that America will forgo about US$39.6 billion in inbound travel spending across 2025 and 2026 compared with what might have occurred had the country maintained its 2024 share of global international travel spending.
That figure needs an important qualification.
It is an economic estimate based on a counterfactual market-share scenario, not US$39.6 billion that has literally disappeared from cash registers.
Nevertheless, it illustrates the competitive stakes.
Tourism Economics expects international traveller spending globally to grow by almost 50 per cent between 2025 and 2030, supported by rising incomes and wealth.
The international tourism pie is therefore getting considerably larger.
America’s task is making certain its slice does not become proportionally smaller.
Canada delivers one of the biggest shocks
Canada has been among the most conspicuous weak spots.
Tourism Economics says Canadian visits to US states declined 21.8 per cent during 2025, with particularly significant consequences for northern border states heavily exposed to Canadian traffic.
That matters because Canadian travel to the United States isn’t limited to lengthy annual holidays.
It includes weekend breaks, shopping visits, entertainment, sport, family visits, short driving holidays and frequent repeat business.
A Canadian couple deciding not to cross the border may look trivial in isolation.
Multiply that decision millions of times, and suddenly hotels, restaurants, retailers, and local attractions begin paying attention.
U.S. Travel similarly says Canada’s weakness drove the overall 5.5 per cent fall in international visitor volume to 68.3 million in 2025.
Yet again, though, the picture differs markedly by market.
Tourism Economics reports Mexican arrivals grew 14.6 per cent through June 2026, building on 6.4 per cent growth during 2025. South America was also performing positively through August.
One cannot therefore hang a simple “closed for business” sign on American inbound tourism.
The source markets are behaving very differently.
Australia has also stepped backwards
For the Australian travel industry, one figure is especially relevant.
Official US Department of Commerce data show approximately 960,000 Australians travelled to the United States during 2025, compared with about 1.025 million in 2024.
That was a 6.5 per cent decline and Australia’s first annual fall after three consecutive years of growth between 2022 and 2024.
Yet Australians remain valuable visitors.
The US Department of Commerce ranks Australia eighth globally by visitor spending, with average US travel exports per Australian arrival calculated at US$6,819. Australian travel exports to the US totalled approximately US$7 billion in 2024.
That makes Australia more important than the raw visitor count might suggest.
Australians also tend to be long-haul travellers who frequently combine destinations, perhaps California with Nevada, New York with Washington, or a cruise with pre- and post-cruise touring.
For airlines, wholesalers, travel advisors, hotels and US destination marketing organisations operating in Australia, these visitors are commercially valuable indeed.
Visas and the inconvenience factor
Tourism marketing departments prefer photographs of beaches and skylines.
Unfortunately, holidays are also influenced by considerably less photogenic subjects: visas, border processing, airport queues and paperwork.
U.S. Travel Association argues that several practical barriers are weakening America’s competitiveness.
It says visa waiting periods are approaching four months in some major inbound markets, while only 43 countries qualify for US visa-free travel arrangements, compared with the 102 countries it cites for the United Kingdom.
The organisation also points to ageing air-traffic-control and airport infrastructure and shortages of aviation workers and Customs and Border Protection officers.
These are the views and policy positions of U.S. Travel, the country’s major travel-industry advocacy organisation, rather than an independent finding that every delayed tourist has cancelled a journey because of these issues.
But commercially, friction matters.
A traveller choosing between Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, Singapore, Paris or another major destination may be weighing dozens of considerations.
If one journey appears easier to organise and another involves considerably more bureaucracy, tourism can lose the argument before the passenger reaches an aircraft.
Nobody ever returned from a holiday raving about the wonderful immigration paperwork.
Border policy and traveller sentiment
Perception is also a more complicated issue.
Tourism Economics has identified traveller sentiment, government policy announcements, border-security coverage, exchange rates and geopolitical conditions among factors influencing US inbound performance.
These factors should not be presented as the explanation for every cancelled journey. Travellers change plans for myriad reasons, from household budgets and currency movements to airfare, safety concerns and simple preference.
But destination image undoubtedly matters.
One example illustrates how seriously the tourism industry is taking the issue.
In January 2026, WTTC published research examining proposed wider social-media disclosure requirements associated with the United States’ ESTA visa-waiver system.
A survey of 4,563 international travellers across nine countries, including Australia, found 34 per cent said they would be somewhat or much less likely to visit the US during the next two to three years if the proposed requirements were introduced.
WTTC subsequently modelled a high-impact scenario in which the proposal could result in approximately 4.7 million fewer arrivals from ESTA countries and as much as US$15.7 billion in reduced visitor spending compared with its business-as-usual baseline.
Those are modelled potential outcomes, not losses already incurred.
That distinction is essential.
What they do demonstrate is that the travel industry regards perceptions of entry complexity and privacy as genuine commercial considerations.
The World Cup provided a fascinating test
Then came football.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup gave American tourism something approaching a real-world experiment in whether a compelling event could overcome softer inbound demand.
It appears that it could at least temporarily.
U.S. Travel reported international inbound travel to US World Cup host cities increased 0.7 per cent during the tournament, reversing the 3.6 per cent decline recorded nationally between January and May.
Hotel results were stronger still.
Across the 11 US host markets, revenue per available room rose 17.8 per cent over the tournament period and 35.2 per cent on match days, principally because of higher room rates.
Tourism Economics separately estimated that the tournament generated approximately US$634 million in incremental hotel room revenue in US host markets on and around match dates.
The World Cup did not cure America’s wider inbound problem.
But it demonstrated something tourism marketers have known since the first traveller followed a sign saying “something interesting this way”.
Give people a compelling enough reason to travel, and they often will.
The United States now has another huge opportunity looming with the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games.
The difficulty is that great tourism economies cannot survive entirely on mega-events.
They must also remain competitive on an unremarkable Tuesday.
Official forecasts remain surprisingly optimistic
Here comes the intriguing contradiction.
Despite the recent weakness, the US National Travel and Tourism Office’s April 2026 forecast remains distinctly positive.
NTTO expects total international visitation to increase 3.2 per cent from 68.3 million visitors in 2025 to 70.5 million in 2026.
It then forecasts:
- 74.1 million international visitors in 2027;
- 78.7 million in 2028;
- a record 82.3 million in 2029; and
- approximately 85.2 million in 2030.
That would represent growth of approximately 25 per cent between 2025 and 2030.
Australia is also forecast to recover.
The NTTO projection puts Australian visitation at about 973,000 in 2026, compared with roughly 959,000–960,000 in 2025, before climbing to approximately 1.25 million by 2030.
However, there is an important timing issue.
The NTTO published its forecast in April 2026.
Tourism Economics’ latest September analysis subsequently found overseas arrivals running below expectations, with a 5.8 per cent year-to-date decline through August.
Those two sets of figures are not necessarily contradictory.
NTTO’s total international count includes Canada and Mexico, whereas its definition of overseas visitation excludes both countries. Mexico’s strong performance can therefore help total arrivals even while overseas travel remains weak.
It does, however, mean America’s recovery remains far from guaranteed.
U.S. Travel’s separate Spring 2026 forecast is similarly constructive, predicting international visits will rise 3.4 per cent to 70.6 million in 2026, while real international inbound spending increases 1.6 per cent to approximately US$178 billion.
But U.S. Travel also cautions that the recovery remains sensitive to policy conditions, traveller sentiment and geopolitical stability.
Forecasts, after all, are road maps, not boarding passes.
Only three states escaped the decline
Perhaps one of the most striking findings comes from Tourism Economics’ examination of individual US states.
It says only three states recorded growth in international overnight visitors during 2025.
States most heavily exposed to declining Canadian visitation and least exposed to growing Mexican visitation experienced some of the sharpest falls.
This is important because national tourism figures can hide enormous regional differences.
Florida, New York, California, Texas, Nevada and Hawaii do not necessarily experience the same international trends as Maine, Michigan, Montana or Washington State.
For tourism businesses on the ground, “US international arrivals” can therefore be an almost meaningless statistic unless you understand the source market and destination.
America doesn’t have an attraction problem
That is perhaps the most encouraging part of this story.
America has certainly not run out of reasons to visit.
Few countries can put Manhattan, Hollywood, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, Hawaii, Alaska, Miami Beach, New Orleans, Route 66, Disney, Las Vegas and some of the world’s great museums, national parks and entertainment centres on the same tourism menu.
The challenge is increasingly one of conversion and competitiveness.
Global travellers are travelling.
They are spending record amounts.
And more destinations are competing for their money than ever.
The alarm, therefore, is not that international tourism to America has vanished.
It is that global international travel spending is expanding while America has been losing international market share and several important inbound markets remain in retreat.
For the United States tourism industry, the response is unlikely to come from one advertising campaign or one sporting event.
It means competitive aviation access, efficient visa processing, well-managed borders, sustained international marketing, dependable airport infrastructure and a visitor experience that convinces people that the journey is worth both the money and the effort.
America has spent generations teaching travellers worldwide to dream of visiting.
The commercial challenge now is making certain those dreams continue turning into bookings.
Because in today’s fiercely competitive tourism market, travellers have something remarkably powerful at their disposal.
Choice.
And they are using it.
By: Jason Smith – © 2026.
Read Time: 9 minutes.
Author Bio:
Jason Smith didn’t learn travel from textbooks. He learned it in airports, taxis and hotel lobbies, watching the business unfold long before he played his own part. Half American, half Asian, he grew up around the quiet workings of tourism, where people come and go, and stories rarely stand still.
Bangkok came first, then formal study, then a career that carried him through Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam. Each place left something behind. In the end, Thailand felt like home, along with a senior role in hotel sales.
Then everything stopped. Borders shut, planes grounded, and Jason found himself back in America with time to reflect.
Now at Stephen’s EGT Media, he writes travel as it really is, not polished, not perfect, but human, and all the better for it.
