tourism – R&R – Reachout and Rebuild

“Trump Slump” in tourism

David Posnett — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 17:53:32 +0000

I have previously posted on the “Trump Slump” in tourism. And here, and here too. But it is time to reexamine the issue because the data over one solid year indicate that the slump is here to stay! How will this affect us locally? TBD.

U.S. Economy Losing Billions As ‘Trump Slump’ Continues In Tourism Sector

By Alexandra Talty , Women@Forbes

Disney Land. The Grand Canyon. The Golden Gate Bridge. Yosemite. The World Trade Center.

The United States has long been a bucket-list destination, but as executive announcement piles on executive announcement, international visitors are wary of choosing the tourism-behemoth for their next vacation.

Inbound arrivals have fallen 1.4% since January, while global arrivals have jumped 4.6%, leading many travel industry experts to say the ‘Trump Slump’ is real. Credit: Nick DeSantis, Forbes.

After the announcement of the first two travel bans in January and March, the number of international travelers arriving in the U.S. has dramatically dropped, according to ForwardKeys, a European travel-prediction firm.

https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-14/html/container.html

Looking at the number of U.S. inbound arrivals – or the number of international tourists arriving at airports around the country – the firm found that the number of visitors dropped 1.3% following the announcement of the first travel ban on January 27. On June 26, when the second ban was partially re-instated, inbound visitors dropped again by 2.8%.

Experts expected to see falling arrivals following the first executive announcement in January, when European interest in visiting the U.S. fell 12% but to see the number of arrivals impacted so quickly is startling.

“The confusing and convoluted travel bans have done nothing but worsen the country’s reputation around the world,” said Lee Abbamonte, an American travel expert who has been to every country in the world, in an email. Although he believes there should be a vetting process, he says that as it stands now, it is too stringent, and confusing for many international citizens.

A small percentage drop in arrivals is no small potatoes when translated into a dollar amount. In 2016, the U.S. travel and tourism industry generated over $1.5 trillion in economic output, supporting 7.6 million jobs, according to SelectUSA, an international trade analyst firm. That represents 2.7% of overall GDP.

“I’m not surprised inbound travel is dropping,” agrees Liz Carlson, a travel expert blogger who was recently named New Zealand’s top blogger, in an email. An American, Carlson lives in Wanaka, New Zealand. Most of her friends are foreigners, and Carlson says that each of the executive announcements, as well as laptop bans, have put many off from traveling to the land of the free and the brave.

She says, “Whenever I meet people traveling, everyone says something about it, and nothing is positive … My friends who have traveled there recently are worried about the rules where TSA can look through your phones or laptops.”

In March, after the second travel ban, Oxford Economics, an advisory and analysis firm, found that travel could drop by 8% due to the executive announcements and procedures to restrict immigration to the U.S.

“Our latest detailed findings confirm what our data has been predicting since the first travel ban. There has been a ‘Trump Slump,’ and the strong dollar has compounded it,” said ForwardKeys co-founder and CEO, Olivier Jager, in an email. “This must be worrying for the US economy – travel is a huge earner for the United States, and relative to the rest of the world, its tourism exports are losing ground.”

Tourism is the seventh largest employer in the US economy. In 2012, nearly 84% of travel companies identified themselves as small businesses. For those Americans, the outlook is bleak.

Over the first three months of Donald Trump’s presidency, 697,791 fewer foreigners visited the U.S. than normal, down 4.2% to 15.8 million people, according to new figures released by the U.S. Department of Commerce. That drop accounted for $2.7 billion in spending, according to Tourism Economics.

In cities like New York, foreign tourists spend four times as much as domestic tourists, so even slight drops in inbound arrivals spell big losses for the U.S. economy. According to US Travel, international travel spending directly supports 1.2 million American jobs, accounting for nearly $32.4 billion in wages. the typical overseas traveler spends around $4,360 when visiting the United States, over an 18 night stay.

Cities across the U.S. have seen the writing on the wall and are bracing for declining tourism revenues. Los Angeles Tourism board led the charge earlier this year, putting millions towards a marketing campaign to welcome foreigners with a gigantic human powered sign that welcomed incoming planes in four languages. Other tourism boards have followed suit with their own campaigns.

But as the third executive announcement is implemented and the Supreme Court hearing on the previous travel bans is cancelled, many industry experts wonder if this is just the beginning of another lagging sector in the U.S. economy as tourists choose destinations with easier, more comprehensive visa policies.

https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-14/html/container.html

Alexandra Talty is a writer and columnist, exploring the world on a journalist’s paycheck. Follow her adventures on Twitter and Instagram.

Comment (D. Posnett): I have wondered how a real estate mogul like Trump who owns hotels and golf courses does not seem to care about tourism. It is interesting to follow stock prices of major hotel chains like Hilton and Marriott and see that they are doing just fine. In fact, like Trump businesses, they are expanding internationally. So perhaps this means that worldwide tourism is not that much affected. It is just that international tourists are chosing to go elsewhere rather than visiting the USA. For example, as the per Dan Caplinger in the Motely Fool: “Marriott sees prosperous days ahead. Sorenson noted that the international opportunity that the hotel company has is huge, pointing out that more than half of rooms under development are located outside North America“.

So much for those American jobs that Trump voters had bet on.

I Would Short Tourism to the USA

David Posnett — Tue, 27 Jun 2017 17:28:57 +0000

I can personally confirm the unpopularity of DT and the USA in Switzerland where I am currently!

Apparently the sentiment is wide spread: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-image-survey-idUSKBN19I00F?utm_source=applenews

http://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-9/html/container.html

World News | Tue Jun 27, 2017 | 7:28am EDT

Image of the United States has plunged under Trump, survey shows

By Noah Barkin | BERLIN

The image of the United States has deteriorated sharply across the globe under President Donald Trump and an overwhelming majority of people in other countries have no confidence in his ability to lead, a survey from the Pew Research Center showed.

Five months into Trump’s presidency, the survey spanning 37 nations showed U.S. favorability ratings in the rest of the world slumping to 49 percent from 64 percent at the end of Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House.

But the falls were far steeper in some of America’s closest allies, including U.S. neighbors Mexico and Canada, and European partners like Germany and Spain.

Trump took office in January pledging to put “America First”. Since then he has pressed ahead with plans to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico, announced he will pull out of the Paris climate accord, and accused countries including Canada, Germany and China of unfair trade practices.

On his first foreign trip as president in early June, Trump received warm welcomes in Saudi Arabia and Israel, but a cool reception from European partners, with whom he clashed over NATO spending, climate and trade.

Just 30 percent of Mexicans now say they have a favorable view of the United States, down from 66 percent at the end of the Obama era. In Canada and Germany, favorability ratings slid by 22 points, to 43 percent and 35 percent, respectively

In many European countries, the ratings were comparable to those seen at the end of the presidency of George W. Bush, whose 2003 invasion of Iraq was deeply unpopular.

“The drop in favorability ratings for the United States is widespread,” the Pew report said. “The share of the public with a positive view of the U.S. has plummeted in a diverse set of countries from Latin America, North America, Europe, Asia and Africa”.

BELOW PUTIN AND XI

The survey, based on the responses of 40,447 people and conducted between Feb. 16 and May 8 this year, showed even deeper mistrust of Trump himself, with only 22 percent of those surveyed saying they had confidence he would do the right thing in world affairs, compared to 64 percent who trusted Obama.

Image of the United States plummets under Trump

The image of the United States in the world has been seriously damaged by President Donald Trump and an overwhelming majority of people in other countries have no confidence in his ability to manage world affairs, a Pew Research Center survey showed.

The countries with the lowest confidence in Trump were Mexico, at 5 percent and Spain at 7 percent. The only two countries where ratings improved compared to Obama were Russia, where confidence in the U.S. president surged to 53 percent from 11 percent, and Israel, where it rose 7 points to 56 percent.

Globally, 75 percent of respondents described Trump as “arrogant”, 65 percent as “intolerant” and 62 percent as “dangerous”. A majority of 55 percent also described him as a “strong leader”.

The survey showed widespread disapproval of Trump’s signature policy proposals, with 76 percent unhappy with his plan to build the wall on the border with Mexico, 72 percent against his withdrawal from major trade agreements and 62 percent opposed to his plans to restrict travel to the U.S. from some majority-Muslim countries.

On the positive side, the survey showed that 58 percent of respondents had a positive view of Americans in general. And in many regions of the world, a majority or plurality of respondents said they expected relations with the United States to stay roughly the same in spite of Trump.