“Americans are traveling more as they get richer. US residents took 24 million trips to Europe in 2025, up from 13.4 million in 2000, while the share of consumer spending devoted to foreign travel has reached a record high,” explains The Doomslayer.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
American travel has transformed in recent decades. A nation of former homebodies has become one of zealous and moneyed international travelers, infiltrating every cobblestoned corner of Europe and rapidly filling lesser-known destinations.
Americans took a record 24 million trips to Europe in 2025. Portugal received nearly five times the number of U.S. visitors last year as it did a decade earlier. Greece took in four times as many…
Behind the shift is a supercharged U.S. economy that in the course of a generation has created a larger and wealthier class of Americans that views travel as an essential rather than a luxury. Older Americans, who are driving this new era of travel, hold about $110 trillion in wealth. They’re also living longer, and looking to make the most of those years.
That rising wealth has coincided with dramatic changes in the travel industry itself. Foreign travel has become more accessible. And social media has made it easy to envy, emulate and one-up friends’ vacations.
But tourism to the U.S. has been stagnant from 2015 to 2025. It did rise in 2015, but then it fell during the COVID pandemic.
Then tourist visits to America fell again under the second Trump administration, after Trump antagonized Canadian tourists by imposing tariffs on Canada, and by repeatedly talking about making Canada the “51st state.” Trump antagonized Europeans by talking about taking Greenland from our NATO ally, Denmark, and by announcing he would impose tariffs on Europe to pressure Denmark to give up Greenland (America does not even need Greenland).
International tourism to the U.S. dropped in 2025, with 4 million fewer foreign visitors and an $8.4 billion loss in spending compared to 2024, according to National Travel and Tourism Office data.
Tourism to the U.S. from Denmark fell sharply in 2025, by 43%, beginning with a 10% dip in May and a 17.8% drop in June.
