US Tourism Still Suffers: Arrivals Down 7.7% in September

National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO) has released data indicating a slight slowdown in US-international air traffic in September 2025.

Passenger enplanements totaled 20.7 million, down 2.0 percent from September 2024. Even so, activity remained above pre-pandemic levels, reaching 103.3 percent of September 2019 volume.

International arrivals also eased. The United States received 2.8 million overseas visitors in September, equivalent to 81.1 percent of the September 2019 benchmark and well below the 86 percent recovery level recorded in August 2025.

Seasonality accounts for this decline, as international volumes typically drop following peak summer travel. Global economic uncertainty, including inflation, weaker consumer confidence, and strong dollar, has further restrained demand.

Arrivals fell 7.7 percent compared with the previous year, and cumulative overseas visitation for the first nine months of 2025 was down 2.4 percent year-over-year.

Outbound demand from the United States remained healthy. US citizen departures reached 5.6 million, up 2.7 percent year-over-year and 25.5 percent above 2019 figures, reflecting strong interest in overseas travel.

The top international air markets for combined arrivals and departures included:

• Canada: 2.5 million passengers (down 11.3 percent);
• Mexico: 2.4 million (down 3.2 percent);
• The UK: 1.9 million (down 2.8 percent);
• Germany: 1.1 million (up 0.04 percent); and
• Japan: 886,000 million (up 9.7 percent).

While Canada remains the United States’ largest international travel partner, the cross-border movement has weakened substantially.

In October 2025, roughly 1.4 million Canadians returned home by car from the US, which is 30.5 percent lower than the previous year. Air travel saw a similar contraction, with only 437,300 Canadians flying home from the US, a decline of nearly 24 percent year-over-year.

These declines reflect broader hesitation among Canadian travelers mainly due to increasingly strained political dynamics between the two countries.

Photo by Kenny Xie on Unsplash