Travel to US yet to recover from Trump travel ban and Brexit
International travel to the US has yet to recover from President Trump’s travel ban and the Brexit referendum.
Latest figures from ForwardKeys, which predicts future travel patterns by analysing 17 million booking transactions a day, said bookings for the first two months of the year were down 0.02% on 2017.
Last year saw an overall dip of 2% in arrivals following the first of the Trump travel bans on travellers from a number of mainly Muslim countries.
The Forwardkeys’ findings show that the impact of sterling’s fall against the dollar, following the 2016 Brexit vote, persisted well into 2017 and put off many Britons visiting the US.
The number of Chinese visitors to the US also flattened out in 2017 after substantial growth in 2016.
Looking forward six months, international bookings to the US from within the Americas are currently 7% ahead of where they were at the same time last year, while long-haul bookings from elsewhere are just 0.5% up.
Miami – traditionally Florida’s biggest destination city – was 1% down last year while Orlando was 0.8% up and Fort Lauderdale was up 2.7%.
Linsey McNeill
Editor Linsey McNeill has been writing about travel for more than three decades. Bylines include The Times, Telegraph, Observer, Guardian and Which? plus the South China Morning Post. She also shares insider tips on thetraveljournalist.co.uk
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