A downturn in travel could hurt not only the tourism industry in the United States, but also its retailers.<\/p>\n
Nearly $20 billion in retail spending is at stake this year, Bloomberg reported<\/a> Thursday (July 24).<\/p>\n Some travelers are avoiding the U.S. entirely, in many cases due to the President Donald Trump administration\u2019s immigration policies<\/a>, the report said. Tourists who do come are often recalculating their budgets as inflation increases the cost of hotels and restaurants.<\/p>\n While travel spending typically grows annually, it has remained essentially flat this year, according to the report, which cited data from the U.S. International Trade Administration<\/a> (ITA). Meanwhile, foreign visitors to the U.S. by air fell 6.6% in June compared to the previous year.<\/p>\n \u201cTourists would come with empty suitcases, and they would go out, fill the suitcases up and then ship those suitcases home,\u201d said Floris van Dijkum<\/a>, managing director at financial services firm Ladenburg Thalmann<\/a>, per the report.<\/p>\n Now, spending habits are changing, and while the \u201cjury is still out on the ultimate impact, \u2026 clearly you\u2019re going to see some pressure,\u201d he said, according to the report.<\/p>\n Among the travelers feeling that pressure is Annet van der Meer, who was visiting New York City from the Netherlands. She said that while she\u2019s still shopping with U.S. retailers, most of her vacation budget goes to everyday expenses, the report said.<\/p>\n \u201cCompared with Europe, it\u2019s unbelievable,\u201d said van der Meer, per the report. \u201cFood<\/a> is very expensive, alcohol is very expensive \u2014 I think in Europe we pay two times less than here.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, U.S. shoppers<\/a> continue to spend. The latest data on retail spending from the U.S. Census Bureau<\/a> showed sales up 0.6% from May to June, and 3.9% since June 2024.<\/p>\n \u201cWhile tariffs have grabbed the headlines \u2014 and have caused a great deal of uncertainty \u2014 they have not hit the retail sector with full force,\u201d said GlobalData<\/a> Managing Director Neil Saunders<\/a>. \u201cMost of this is because the deadlines for tariffs<\/a> to be imposed have been constantly moved, and most stock being sold in the half was not subject to additional levies. The question \u2026 is whether the reasonable first-half performance continues into the second half.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A downturn in travel could hurt not only the tourism industry in the United States, but also its…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":90765,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[64,4051,79,50,751,6270,5331,1164,67,132,68,756],"class_list":{"0":"post-90764","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-consumer-spending","10":"tag-economy","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-pymnts-news","13":"tag-retail","14":"tag-tourism","15":"tag-travel","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us","19":"tag-whats-hot"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114912642280014301","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}