Here at Connect Travel’s INBOUND, we have seen, read and heard enough reports to realize this—as such accounts have ranged from those in which concerns are effectively dismissed by the expectation that everything will work out all right in the end to an advisory released last week by China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism which cautioned travelers not to visit the U.S. due to American’s overreaction to the deadly virus, unfair treatment of Chinese tourists in the U.S. and what the South China Morning Post described as “unspecified uncertainties over its domestic security.”
News accounts and numbers related to the coronavirus are changing frequently—not just daily, but sometimes every three or four hours. In such an environment, there is a need for all of us to stay up-to-date with the latest and accurate accounts on the situation through the resource materials provided by the U.S. Travel Association. Visit its website (www.ustravel.org) and you will a find wide variety of information that will help all of us to deal with the coronavirus.
In the meantime, it was announced by US Travel that the Leading Travel Index (LTI), the predictive component of its Travel Trends Index (TTI), projects international inbound travel to the U.S. will fall 6 percent over the next three months as the coronavirus outbreak continues to roil the global economy.
The latest TTI captures data from January, when awareness of coronavirus began to ramp up and China—one of the biggest travel markets to the U.S.—implemented aggressive measures to curb travel out of certain cities.