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USA tourism is great this year?
Executive Summary
The simple statement "USA tourism is great this year" is overly broad and misleading: domestic travel shows resilience and spending remains strong, but multiple authoritative forecasts point to a meaningful decline in international visitors and inbound spending in 2025. Taken together, the evidence paints a mixed picture—robust domestic activity offset by weaker international arrivals—which means the sector’s overall health depends on which metrics you prioritize [1] [2] [3].
1. Why domestic travel looks strong — Americans are still spending and taking trips
Domestic travel metrics in 2024–2025 indicate continued consumer appetite for U.S. travel, with multiple analyses reporting substantial domestic spending and frequent trips by Americans. Industry summaries note domestic travel spending near or above $1.2 trillion in 2025 and highlight that Americans took multiple domestic trips in 2024, averaging significant per-traveler expenditures; these findings support claims that internal tourism activity is a bright spot for the sector [2] [4]. The U.S. Travel Association and market trackers observe modest domestic growth forecasts for 2025 — for example, domestic leisure spending projected to grow roughly 1.9% — which sustains hotel, airline, and rental-car demand despite broader headwinds. This domestic strength underpins the argument that parts of U.S. tourism are indeed “great” for local economies and businesses that primarily rely on American travelers [1] [2].
2. Why international inbound travel is a prominent weakness this year
Contrasting the domestic story, multiple forecasts converge on a drop in international arrivals and inbound spending for 2025, undermining claims that overall U.S. tourism is uniformly strong. The U.S. Travel Association projects international visits falling from 72.4 million in 2024 to 67.9 million in 2025 — a 6.3% decline that represents the first drop since 2020 and reduces inbound spending to roughly $173 billion [5] [1]. Tourism Economics projects even steeper year-to-date declines in overseas arrivals and revised forecasts that expect an 8.2% fall in overall international arrivals across 2025, with notable softness from key markets such as Canada [6]. These declines translate into billions in lost visitor spending and potential job impacts, particularly in gateway cities and regions dependent on overseas tourists [4].
3. Conflicting forecasts: why different sources tell different stories
The data landscape includes contradictory projections that reflect differing methodologies, cut-off dates, and assumptions about currency, travel restrictions, and event-driven demand. For example, the National Travel and Tourism Office forecast suggests a rebound with 77 million international visitors in 2025 and continued growth through 2029, framing a narrative of recovery beyond pre-pandemic levels [7]. By contrast, the U.S. Travel Association and Tourism Economics present a near-term contraction in inbound travelers and spending for 2025, citing issues such as visa backlogs, operational deterrents, and geopolitical travel patterns [5] [6] [3]. These divergent views underscore that “this year” depends on timing and metric choice: calendar-year snapshots, month-to-date arrivals, and multi-year trend models can all yield different conclusions [1] [7].
4. Who wins and who loses — distributional impacts across the industry
Even if aggregate domestic figures look solid, the benefits are unevenly distributed. Destinations reliant on domestic road trips, regional tourism, and U.S. leisure travelers perform relatively well, while international gateway cities and sectors dependent on long-haul visitors — luxury hotels, business travel services, and international-tour-dependent attractions — face the brunt of weaker inbound flows [2] [6]. Canadian visitation and other near-neighbor markets show pronounced declines in some reports, creating concentrated shortfalls in border-region economies. Analysts warn that systemic frictions — visa wait times, outdated entry systems, and new travel deterrents — exacerbate this unevenness and risk long-term market share loss if unaddressed [3] [4].
5. Outlook and inflection points — why 2026 and major events matter
Several sources point to potential recovery levers in 2026 and beyond, notably major events like the FIFA World Cup and the U.S. 250th Anniversary, which could drive international returns and restore lost spending levels by 2027–2029 under optimistic scenarios [1] [7]. The timing and magnitude of any rebound hinge on policy fixes (streamlining visa/entry processes), currency effects (a weaker dollar can boost inbound demand), and macroeconomic conditions that influence outbound travel from source markets [6] [3]. Therefore, while parts of U.S. tourism are “great” when measured by domestic resilience, systemic headwinds to international inbound travel mean the overall verdict for 2025 is mixed and conditional on near-term policy and market shifts [5] [4].