International tourists to U.S. fall, but Americans keep going abroad

Caroline Smith, an accounting director from Verona, New Jersey, and her husband took their two children to Italy for Easter break this month. On the Spanish Steps in Rome, they ran into another family from their town. Two other families from the same area were also independently visiting Italy at the same time, she said.

The families are part of an emerging trend in the $11 trillion global travel industry: Americans are traveling abroad in droves, while the number of visitors to the United States is falling.

Foreign visitors to the United States by air fell nearly 10% in March from the same month a year earlier and nearly 13% from before the pandemic to 4.54 million people, according to data from the International Trade Administration, part of the Commerce Department.

Easter week last year was in March, causing some vacations to shift this year. However, U.S. citizens flying abroad increased 1.6% from last March and are up 22% from 2019 to 6.56 million travelers.

The imbalance could further deepen the more than $50 billion gap between what the U.S. generates through travel and tourism services and what Americans spend abroad. It’s a concern for the U.S. travel industry, which brings in about $1 trillion a year. The U.S. Travel Association on Jan. 9 said it expected a more than 12% increase in spending from international tourism in the United States this year.

Including land border crossings, inbound visitors to the U.S. fell 14% in March from last year, the industry group said Thursday. It said if the trend holds the U.S. could lose $21 billion in exports tied to travel. (Travel spending from abroad within the U.S. is counted as an export.)

An on-again, off-again trade war, high-profile detentions of visitors as well as visa holders and permanent residents, along with President Donald Trump‘s rhetoric about taking over countries like Canada, and a strong U.S. dollar for much of this year and travel warnings haven’t helped drum up demand from international travelers.

“We’ve gotta make the U.S. a place they want to go,” American Airlines CEO Robert Isom said in an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday. He echoed other travel leaders saying that the visa-approval process should be streamlined.

JPMorgan warned that the decline in foreigners’ travel spend in the U.S. could subtract around 0.1% from gross domestic product this year.

“This points to potentially another channel to consider in assessing the effect of tariffs on economic activity,” it said. “Concerns around detentions of foreign visitors, sometimes by accident, are only compounding this effect.”

“President Trump’s agenda to make America wealthy, safe, and beautiful again benefits Americans and international visitors alike,” White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in an e-mailed statement. She said the administration is “spearheading the effort to show all that makes America great by bringing global sporting events, including the World Cup and Olympics, to the USA..”

Samuel Engel, senior vice president at consulting firm ICF, said that while “there’s no question that foreigners are finding the U.S. less welcoming” another question is if the hesitance to travel to the U.S. from abroad is now showing up in international business travel.

“Business people don’t ink deals in the face of uncertainty,” he said.

United Airlines last week said bookings from international passengers originating in Europe are down 6%, while those originating in Canada are down 9% year over year. Delta Air Lines said it was seeing a similar phenomenon.

But American consumers’ appetite for international trips is helping to soften the blow of fewer international tourists and weaker-than-expected demand in domestic U.S. travel for some companies, like United and Delta, which are cutting back flights within the United States later this year.

“I traveled around Europe a lot pre-kids so I’ve been trying to do the same with the family now that the kids are older,” said Smith, 44, who has a 7-year-old and an 11-year-old. “We went to Spain in 2023 and Portugal in 2024, chosen in part because the flights are short, in comparison to Greece, which is on the list.”

Grace Cular Yee, a travel adviser who owns Pineapple7 agency in Lansdowne, Virginia, said a lot of her clients are considering international travel more than domestic in part because they’re wanting to splash out on college graduation trips since their kids largely missed out on high school commencement celebrations during Covid.

“This is a major milestone for the whole family,” she said, adding that while many travelers get ideas from social media, more Americans are also getting inspired by television shows, like the latest season of “The White Lotus,” which was set in Thailand. She said she recently planned a trip to France for a mother-daughter high school graduation trip because the daughter loves the show “Emily in Paris.”

United said that advanced bookings earlier this month are stable and premium-cabin sales are up 17%, while international demand has risen 5%.

Delta’s president, Glen Hauenstein, is optimistic that the trend will continue and said cash sales for international travel are coming in ahead of the same point last year.

“Sales that are coming in the door as of yesterday that we’re recording today as cash are very strong for international through the summer all the way out to September, October,” he said on an April 9 earnings call, adding that international sales were up on the year.

Many working Americans and retirees are on edge with recent market tumult, but wealthy and aging travelers, particularly in the pricey front of the plane, are helping to offset that.

“Being a baby boomer, I can say this without fear of retribution: There’s only so much time to go to Europe or almost so much time to go see Australia or Japan,” Hauenstein said on the earnings call. “So you’ve got this wealth effect where this cohort of retirees is wealthier than any other cohort even with the most recent rundown, and they want to go do things.”

It isn’t clear whether a pullback in consumer spending in the back of the plane or even some softness in corporate travel growth is a sign that high-end, international leisure travel bookings will weaken, too. For now, the labor market remains strong.

“Everybody’s life is not fully disrupted but everybody’s life is on more tenuous footing right now,” said ICF’s Engel. “The way people manage uncertainty is they hold back on decisions.”

Correction: Hauenstein spoke on an April 9 earnings call. An earlier version misstated the date.