Hopper App Research has posted weekly flight searches to the US by country of origin and compared pre- versus post-inauguration travel searches.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16DYwfUZSIB89KpM9n7O9LUE-Oj-tPdhtSmbgpOeaPuY/pubhtml#

Guess which travellers are rethinking their visit to the USA?  Obviously, travel plans from the infamous list of banned countries are down.  But travellers from most other countries are down too:

Banned are Libya, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Yemen*, Sudan (Hopper has no flight data for Yemen). Skipped countries are Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Qatar, UAE, Azerbaijan (those that might have been more appropriately on the list given the prior terrorists from these countries).  Note that it looks like we lost about 10 Mio travellers/week from all other countries too  (61 Mio versus 51 Mio, bottom line of the above table).

Now this can’t be good for tourism and related industries!  Not even for Trump hotels and golf courses.   Note that travellers from “friendly” countries like Ireland, Denmark, New Zealand are down 31-32% and travellers from the richest country in the world, tiny Qatar are down 26%.

It is interesting that a few countries have seen an uptick in interest of visiting the US.  At the top of the list is, guess who, Russia.  The change since inauguration is 88% up:  387,581 in the week prior to inauguration and 729,860 in the latest week since the travel ban.

Who are these Russians flooding in to our country?  Are they all hackers? http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2016/09/01/russia-cold-war-panama-papers-podesta-clinton-hack-servers-glenn-reynolds/89657192/

Are they Spetsnaz (Russian Special Forces) troops that have previously been spotted over here?  http://www.petition2congress.com/10798/russian-troops-in-america-confirmedRussian

Or are they interested in business ventures?  Are they all buying condos? http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/12/15/donald-trump-russia-wealthy-condo-buyers/95464922/

Hopper collects, from several Global Distribution System partners, ten to fifteen billion airfare price quotes every day from searches happening all across the web.  I have assumed a more or less linear relationship between travel searches and actual travel.

Thanks to Alice Tepper Marlin for drawing my attention to this!