Trump executive order has adverse effect on travel to U.S.

The demand for travel to the United States dropped dramatically in the wake of President Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order banning people from seven countries from entering the country, reports the New York Times.

The airfare prediction app Hopper found that flight search demand for travel to the United States from 122 international countries dropped 17 per cent after the travel ban came into effect, compared with the first three weeks of the year.

Although the ban was temporarily lifted on Feb. 3, demand for travel to the U.S. was still down by more than ten per cent as of a week later, in comparison with the first three weeks of the year.

Online travel site Cheapflights.com also noted that international searches for flights to the U.S. dropped after the ban, with searches down 38 per cent from Jan. 27 to 29 compared with the previous weekend.

The travel ban also appears to have had a negative impact on flight bookings to the United States. ForwardKeys, a travel research company in Spain, studied 16 million flight reservations a day between Jan. 28 and Feb. 4 and found that international bookings to the U.S. had decreased by 6.5 per cent compared with the same period the year before.

The short-term findings have fuelled fears among travel analysts that Trump’s travel policies could cause more lasting damage to the country’s tourism industry, which created 7.6 million jobs in the U.S. in 2015, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The same year, tourism-related spending to the United States was $1.56 trillion.

Tourism Economics, a division of the economic research firm Oxford Economics, conducted a study of travel to Los Angeles County and concluded that the county could potentially suffer a three-year loss of 800,000 international visitors as a direct consequence of Trump’s travel ban. This amounts to $736 million in tourism spending.