There has been some anecdotal evidence that international arrivals to the US have softened quite a bit this year. Some airlines have signaled that their forward-looking bookings are down (Virgin Atlantic) or that they cannot give guidance about the performance in 2025 (Delta).
Hoteliers have been mostly quiet, although the CEO of Accor, Mr. Sébastien Bazin, told the other week that they are seeing 25% fewer advance bookings by Europeans for the US this summer than last year.
Financial Times has looked into the data and published a piece on Friday that is based on the actual arrivals numbers, number of foreign passengers on flights to the US, and foreign travelers passing through US airports that clearly explain the issue on the following graphs:
Just realised the Iceland data got cut off in the original image because the decline was too steep to fit
pic.twitter.com/eetVRy8EoF
— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) April 11, 2025
There have been recently quite a few headlines about people being detained at the border for various reasons, held for weeks, and then sent back; that probably doesn’t help, although non-admission rates are low.
Conclusion
I am somewhat surprised that airlines have not issued financial guidelines or other traffic data because these drops in passenger numbers, especially for March, must affect the profitability of these trans-Atlantic flights.
Also, unlike business travelers, consumers tend to buy their flights months in advance, so if travelers’ sentiments about visiting the United States don’t change, we might see an even more significant drop later in the year.
I was thinking about his FT piece from Friday when I wrote about Finnair’s culling of 69 US services for this summer. This must be related to the travel slump and not entirely due to the situation they are facing with the pilots.
Iberia also recently trimmed or reduced the frequencies of some of its transatlantic services and decided to open a couple of new routes to North Eastern Brazil (a lovely place to visit) instead.
