The latest monthly arrivals data posted by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO) show that, for the month of January 2020, arrivals from overseas source markets to the United States were off by more than a percent, with more than half of the Top 10 markets down compared to 2019.
Recall that the numbers below were close to final for the month of January—while the people who had contracted the coronavirus were largely confined to China—and they underscore the notion that the outlook for inbound tourism from these markets was already soft … a point underscored recently by Carroll Rheem, vice president of research and analytics at Brand USA, during her remarks to Connect Travel’s Market Outlook session at the Gaylord Palms Resort in Kissimmee, Florida (see article elsewhere in this issue of INBOUND). She summed up her presentation, saying simply, “It’s going to be a tough year.”
Following are the early numbers from NTTO that show how the USA closed out 2019 and started 2020 in the Top 15 Overseas Markets. They do not include figures from the international visitor counts of the USA’s neighboring markets of Canada and Mexico.
