‘Mind-boggling’: The U.S. is the only major country losing visitors, says travel chief — as China’s foreign entries jump 20%
Laura Boast
Oct 3, 2026
You’d think 2026 would be the high point for international travel to the U.S. with the FIFA World Cup on home soil. After all, we’re well past the pandemic.
Sadly, the high point for foreign visitors was 2018, pre-COVID. That year,
79.7 million international visitors came to the U.S. — more than any year since 2000, according to
data from the U.S. Trade Department’s National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO).
While global travel has increased since COVID, fewer travelers are visiting the U.S. Inbound travel to the U.S. has actually dropped in the past two years.
Meanwhile, China has seen a 20% increase in foreign visitors thanks to its expansion of visa-free entry. It all leaves Geoff Freeman, the president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, frustrated.
“We’re the only major country in the world losing visitation,” he told
Axios. “It’s mind-boggling.”
Right now, Freeman said, many international visitors are avoiding the U.S. out of fear they’ll be detained. News coverage hasn’t helped.
Last year, as PBS News
reported, U.S. border agents arrested a German man on a tourist visa, shackled him and held him for 16 days in a detention center. A German woman visiting the U.S. was
detained and spent six weeks in a detention center. Both returned to Germany.
Meanwhile, a
French scientist was denied entry last year because officers observed negative texts about Trump on his phone, per The Guardian.
LOL! Let's post the
whole article instead of the Chinese member's deviously truncated version. haha!!
Yes, travel to the US is at
70 million...down from a pre-covid high of
79 million.
‘Mind-boggling’: The U.S. is the only major country losing visitors, says travel chief — as China’s foreign entries jump 20%
You’d think 2026 would be the high point for international travel to the U.S. with the FIFA World Cup on home soil. After all, we’re well past the pandemic.
Sadly, the high point for foreign visitors was 2018, pre-COVID. That year,
79.7 million international visitors came to the U.S. — more than any year since 2000, according to
data from the U.S. Trade Department’s National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO).
While global travel has increased since COVID, fewer travelers are visiting the U.S. Inbound travel to the U.S. has actually dropped in the past two years.
Meanwhile, China has seen a 20% increase in foreign visitors thanks to its expansion of visa-free entry. It all leaves Geoff Freeman, the president and CEO of the U.S. Travel Association, frustrated.
“We’re the only major country in the world losing visitation,” he told
Axios. “It’s mind-boggling.”
His organization’s goal is to attract 100 million international visitors a year by 2030, which Freeman says would add $81 billion in tourist spending and 400,000 jobs to the economy, according to a
U.S. Travel Association press release.
The current reality:
The U.S. gets 70 million international visitors a year, nearly 10 million less than 2018, during President Donald Trump’s first term. Freeman and a group of travel-sector CEOs
met with the president in September to talk about ways to revive the sector and beat 2018’s numbers.
“President Trump already holds the record for international visitation to the United States — nearly 80 million visitors in 2018,” he said, according to the press release. “Now we have an opportunity to build on the momentum from a successful World Cup — and go much bigger.”
One of Freeman’s top priorities? Addressing a public relations problem.
“We need the government to partner with the private sector and send a clear message to travelers around the world that the U.S. is open for business,” Freeman told the
New York Post.
Of passports, politics and PR problems
Right now, Freeman said, many international visitors are avoiding the U.S. out of fear they’ll be detained. News coverage hasn’t helped.
Last year, as PBS News
reported, U.S. border agents arrested a German man on a tourist visa, shackled him and held him for 16 days in a detention center. A German woman visiting the U.S. was
detained and spent six weeks in a detention center. Both returned to Germany.
Meanwhile, a
French scientist was denied entry last year because officers observed negative texts about Trump on his phone, per The Guardian.
Incidents like this have had an impact on visits from Europe. According to NTTO
data, visits from France dropped nearly 7% in 2025 to 1.6 million. German visits dropped over 11% to approximately 1.7 million.
Freeman told Axios that this year to date, visits from Germany and France are down 16% and 15% respectively. He fears many visitors are staying away due to misinformation.
“We can drive that focus of making sure we’re bringing in the people we want to bring in and making sure we keep out the people we want to keep out,” he told the Post.
Tariff tensions between the U.S. and its neighbors, Canada and Mexico, have not helped. Without naming Canada, Freeman told the Post, there are “individuals who are upset about various trade issues and have decided that they’re going to boycott the United States.”
Trump
raised tariffs on many Canadian imports to 50% effective September 8 amid an ongoing trade war. While visits from Mexico have actually increased in the past two years, the same is not true of Canada.
According to
CBS News, Canadians spent $13.3 billion in the U.S. in 2025, nearly $2 billion less than in 2024, and there were four million fewer of them visiting, per NTTO figures.
Millions in lost federal funding, billions in lost tourism revenue
Freeman says these developments have cost the U.S. travel industry billions of dollars in lost revenue. Federal research indicates that
international visitors spent $176 billion in the U.S. 2025, a drop of more than $8 billion from 2024 tourism revenue.
But his plan to counter negative PR with positive PR surrounding tourism is itself a costly proposition — and all the more challenging because the Trump administration cut funding for such work last year.
In 2025, Brand USA — the public-private organization dedicated to marketing U.S. tourism globally — saw its
federal funding slashed from
$100 million to $20 million, an 80% cut. The organization shuttered GoUSA TV, which promoted the U.S. as a tourist destination on streaming platforms like Apple TV.
After 2027, its funding is uncertain. For now, one of Freeman’s biggest marketing campaigns is to lobby the federal government to restore that funding.
okay DeepSeek is excluding Taiwan and I know it will be useless to debate it not to.
China has 26.2 Million visitors in 2026.
