It’s not just the global trade in goods that’s been pulled into a tailspin of late. Something now seems amiss with the exchange of tourists and other visitors to the United States, too.
Some surprising data from the US International Trade Administration has shown the number of Irish people travelling to the country in March dropped a staggering 27 per cent on last year.
The same report showed a more than 17 per cent decline in western European countries generally. Fall-offs for the month were significant in other countries, too – notably Germany, Iceland, Luxembourg and Switzerland, all way above the continental average. Denmark, which has had a particularly thorny relationship with the Trump administration over the ownership of Greenland, recorded a 34 per cent drop. No great surprise perhaps.
According to CNN: “European travellers are cancelling planned visits ... amid the Trump administration’s hostile anti-European rhetoric and tariff war.”
It noted stories about tourists being thrown into detention centres, or denied entry to the US possibly because of anti-Trump views.
Eoghan Corry, publisher of TravelExtra, described “intense uncertainty” surrounding how the international tourism market to the US would hold up.
But to coin a phrase popular in the White House these days, the pattern of trade in visitors could be reciprocal.
Ireland’s tourism industry is experiencing a continued and deepening decline in visitors.
Nobody is panicking yet but US tourists, so crucial to Ireland, are in the mix. Central Statistics Office (CSO) data for February showed a dip of about 30 per cent in overall visits, a steep decline estimated to cost the economy about €88 million.
Given that US travellers accounted for about 10 per cent of visitors, a crude number-crunch would suggest the March decline alone brought an economic blow amounting to almost €9 million. While hardly a devastating figure, it is an uncomfortable symptom of a problem nobody wants to see escalate.
Industry stakeholders here have sought to play down these numbers, saying their data for hotels and visitor attractions were more positive.
Writing in The Irish Times recently, Jim Deegan, a professor of tourism policy, sought to contextualise the whole issue of just how reliable tourism data currently is. A more sophisticated pooling of information, he said, could bring “a far greater understanding of what is happening in a location in real time”.
Sorting out the data points will be crucial for the Irish tourism industry to get a handle on the actual direction of travel this year.
