Each month the Scattered Clouds blog takes a look at the wonderful world of tourism through a data and evidence-led lens, all in pursuit of transforming tourism sector data into insight of course!
A transatlantic schism? - January 2026
Three years from now the US will be preparing for the inauguration of its next President. Who that individual will be is anyone’s guess. We’ll need to wait at least a couple of years before the leading contenders emerge, but we’re kidding ourselves if we think that whoever wins will definitely adopt a more warm-hearted stance towards Western Europe than is the case at present.
If something has been like it is now for a long time it’s easy to take it for granted, and arguably that’s a trap that Europe has fallen into over the past few decades. By global standards most countries in Western Europe, including the UK, enjoy high living standards. Following World War II the Marshall Plan saw the US underpin costly reconstruction across Europe and station large numbers of troops across the continent to help ensure stability, and later to deter the Soviet Union as the Cold War era commenced.
Yet many decades later there are still around 90,000 US military personnel permanently based in Western Europe. It should be little surprise then that Americans have started to question whether Europe ought to be relying less on the armed forces of a nation 3,000 or so miles away from its shores for its collective defence.
While the tone adopted towards Western European in the recent US National Security Strategy was at best unsettling for those in Europe and at worst left them feeling as though they were considered a foe rather than a friend, the underpinning sentiment has not come completely out of the blue. The warning signs have been around for the past decade or two, it is just that Europeans have not responded swiftly enough to the gentler diplomatic nudges provided by earlier US administrations.
This is just one strand of the evolving relationship between the US and Europe that could impact the flow of visitors, and visitor spending, both ways across the North Atlantic.
Both the UK and EU have struck modest trade deals with the US administration in terms of alleviating the impact of tariffs originally listed on the quiz show hand-me-down scoreboard revealed back on “Liberation Day”, but trading with the US is now costlier than it was previously, and the belief that tariffs reduce the volume of trade is one of the few things that most (though not all) economists agree on.
Having a hefty number of US military personnel in Europe can bolster VFR travel while bilateral trade underpins the need for business travel. Both of these segments may take a bit of a hit in the next few years, but the bulk of transatlantic travel (whether US to Europe or vice-versa) is for leisure, so is this segment sheltered from the storm?
Back at the start of 2025 there were claims of travel from Europe to the US plummeting and US citizens being too wary to visit Europe in case they weren’t going to be welcome. It is fair to say that both these prophecies proved to be misplaced.
According to US stats the number of inbound visits from citizens of Western Europe in the first eleven months of 2025 did indeed decline, but by a relatively modest 4%, so certainly no precipitous fall, while visits from citizens of Eastern Europe were actually up 2%.
Looking just at visits to the US from the UK the figures indicate a 1% uptick in the January to November period, but travel from France was down 7% and from Germany by 12%, reminding us that when you disaggregate data you often find a variety of stories emerging.
How folks feel about another country can definitely impact travel behaviour, with some compelling contemporary evidence to back up this claim; in the first nine months of 2025 visits to the US by Canadians fell by hefty 22%, while during the first eleven of 2025 arrivals from Denmark (of which Greenland is of course an autonomous territory) fell by 23%. Nationals of some countries are, in significant numbers, making a conscious decision to visit a destinations that’s not America.
The number of American citizens getting on a plane in the US that was destined for somewhere in Europe increased by 5% in the first eleven months of 2025 according to US I-92 data, although the UK witnessed a 0.1% drop in the number of arriving US citizens for this period. These figures suggest that as yet there’s no indication that vast swathes of Americans are feeling too timid to visit European destinations.
Regardless of the cosiness of relations between Europe and the US, 2026 is set to be a year where judging what is going on will be trickier than usual due to major events taking place in the US, namely the FIFA World Cup and celebrations to mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The first of these events may distort transatlantic travel patterns from European nations that have qualified for the tournament, with spikes in demand having the potential to nudge airfares higher and crowd out some “normal” transatlantic leisure travel.
The second of the two events could entice more Americans to take a patriotic domestic trip rather than foreign vacation in 2026, especially around the time of the anniversary on 4th July.
As regular readers may know I’ve always had a penchant for demography, and it’s worth referencing the topic in relation to prospects for transatlantic travel demand. The demographic profile of the US has never stood still, but in recent decades the proportion of Americans with ancestral ties to Europe has been on a downward trajectory, whereas the proportion with roots in Asia or Latin America has been increasing.
While changes in travel choices due to demographic shifts is definitely in the slow-burn category we should not underestimate the degree to which ancestral links have historically underpinned a great deal of travel from the US to Europe, and the extent to which these ties will drive demand in the years ahead is gradually weakening.
A number of decisions made by the US government may act to dissuade Europeans from visiting, including the cost of an ESTA being increased to $40, and from the start of this year introducing a $100 per person “non-resident” entrance fee at eleven of the nation’s most popular National Parks, payable in addition to the regular entrance fee applicable for each National Park.
Then there is the potential, and at the time of writing it is only potential, prospect of the ESTA application process demanding additional information including all email addresses and phone numbers held by the applicant in the past five years, details of their social media history during the same time period and information about all their close relatives.
These financial and non-financial barriers may well lead a slew of those who would otherwise have visited the US opting to travel to a different destination.
While a little less costly and intrusive, Europe is on a similar pathway when it comes to imposing additional costs on visitors, with the UK ETA costing £16 for Americans (valid for two years or until the applicant’s passport expires) and the Schengen area ETIAS set to be introduced towards the end of this year having a €20 cost (valid for 3 years and free to under 18s and over 70s).
A softening in transatlantic demand could lead airlines to trim their networks and/or flight frequencies, reversing the post-pandemic trend of an uptick in the supply of airline seat capacity, with more than 1,000 flights a day operating between the US and Europe during the peak months last summer.
One factor that may help alleviate any reduction in demand is the advent of highly fuel efficient single-aisle aircraft capable of operating transatlantic flights, for example the Airbus A321XLR. This opens up the possibility of providing services on routes to/from second tier cities that would have insufficient demand to sustain operating the route with a wide-bodied aircraft.
Although forever being on the “coming soon” list as opposed to “here now” list is the introduction of a wide-bodied plane that will deliver airlines with a significant reduction in operating costs, namely the Boeing 777X, but first deliveries are not expected until 2027, some seven years after Boeing’s initial expectation.
The inbound market from the US really matters to Britain (28% of inbound holiday spend in 2024 came courtesy of American visitors), and equally to most other destinations across Europe. There has been something of a boom in arrivals in the past few years with US Department of Commerce stats indicating the number of US citizen trips to Europe surged from a fraction over 19 million in 2019 to 22.2 million in 2024, and the tally looks set to have been around 23.3 million last year.
However, booms have a habit of ending.
Equally true is that visitation from Europe is an important source of revenue for many American visitor economy businesses, and if the appetite to visit America nosedives the US administration may face growing disquiet from both corporate entities and citizens whose jobs are at risk. Despite strong US GDP growth US consumers aren’t feeling all that perky at present according to OECD consumer confidence stats.
The cultural and business ties between Europe and the USA are deep and longstanding, and the factors that motivate transatlantic travel are not going to vanish like a puff of smoke. However, the quantum of transatlantic travel can fall as well as rise, with plenty of destinations eager to welcome visitors seeking out an alternative to the US for their holiday. It would be a brave prediction to suggest transatlantic travel volumes will continue to grow in the next few years at the rate seen in recent times, a plateauing in demand, or indeed a dip, are perhaps more probable outcomes.