In this Oct. 15, 2019, photo visitors sporting bucket hats and Washington merchandise pose for photos at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
It has good reason. An enlarged Chinese middle class has become a lucrative market for the U.S. travel industry. Close to 3 million Chinese tourists visited the U.S. last year. And they spent liberally: An estimated average of $6,700 per person per trip — exceeding the average spending of international tourists by more than 50%_according to the US Travel Association.
Yet there is no easy way to replace a drop in Chinese tourism. Some U.S. tourism agencies say they worry that Chinese travelers feel unwelcome in the country under the Trump administration. Warnings from Beijing about traveling to the U.S. have likely reinforced that view. Larry Yu, a professor of hospitality management at George Washington University, warns that once impressions of an unwelcome environment take hold, they’re hard to erase.
Some tourism companies are feeling squeezed. DFS Hawaii, which operates duty-free stores in Hawaiian airports, plans to shed a quarter of its workforce and has pointed to a drop-off in tourists from China and elsewhere in Asia as a reason. As of August, Chinese tourist visits to Hawaii are down 27% this year.
Arizona leveraged social media and Ctrip, a Chinese travel website, to urge visitors to check out the state’s outdoor and wellness activities during the Golden Week holiday period this month. “We can’t control the market conditions,” said Christopher Heywood of NYC & Company, the city’s official tourism marketing agency. “The geopolitics comes into play.”