Report: Tourists don’t want to come to Trump’s America

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Donald Trump appears to have found a new way to keep people out of America: have him become President. According to experts, the “Trump Slump” in travel sales is going to cost the US over $7 billion this year alone.

The travel guide Frommer’s has set the decline in foreign tourism at 6.8 percent for this year while ForwardKeys points out a 6.5 percent decrease in international travel to the United States in the week after Trump attempted his first Muslim ban back in January.

During that same time period, they found that US bound flights from Western Europe went down 14 percent while these flights from the Middle East crashed 38 percent.

To make matters even worse, the Global Business Travel Association has concluded that “45 percent of European business travel professionals say they are less likely to schedule meetings or events in the US.”

These alarming numbers show that Trump is making people reconsider their trips to the US with his harsh “America First” rhetoric. His obsession with immigrants being criminals, his need for a border wall, the Muslim Bans and his anti-refugee stance don’t help soften the hard edges.

— Tina Fey calls out white women who voted Trump — 

“Even white, Anglo-Saxon people, who are most of our customers, they are afraid of crossing the border,” said Al Qanun, who runs a Toronto travel agency. “They don’t want to end up in some prison.”

Tourism Economics uses data to forecast travel trends and they expect the international drop off to result in as much as $7.4 billion and that doesn’t even include the money that is spent by those who come to this country medical treatment or educational reasons. It also doesn’t include the money those visitors spend in the US while they are here.

This all becomes a problem not just because of the money lost but because over 15 million people rely on this industry for their jobs.

It is getting so bad, and alarming experts to the point where they are doing what they can to stop this trend, even going so far as to try and reason with Donald Trump.

Roger Dow, the CEO of the US Travel Association wrote an open letter to Trump.

“Mr. President, please tell the world that while we’re closed to terror, we’re open for business,” the letter says. “Imbalanced communication is especially susceptible to being ‘lost in translation’—so let’s work together to inform our friends and neighbors, who could benefit from reassurance, not just who is no longer welcome here, but who remains invited.”