Demand for
travel to the United States over the coming months has flattened out following
a positive start to the year, with uncertainty over a possible new travel order
likely deterring visitors, travel analysis company ForwardKeys said on Monday.
ForwardKeys,
which analyses 16 million flight reservations a day from major global
reservation systems, also said that travel from the United States to and from
the Middle East has been especially hard hit after President Donald Trump's
move to ban people from seven Muslim-majority countries.
"Uncertainty
reigns and the presidential rhetoric appears to be deterring visitors to the
U.S.," ForwardKeys founder Olivier Jager said in a statement.
U.S. travel
demand is set to be a topic at the world's largest travel fair, the ITB, in
Berlin this week.
After the
travel ban was imposed in January, international travel to the U.S. dropped by
6.5 percent in the following eight days, ForwardKeys data showed last month.
In its latest
update on Monday, ForwardKeys said bookings to the United States recovered
after the courts halted the ban, but dropped again in the nine days after plans
for a new ban were announced on Feb. 17.
Overall,
bookings for travel to the United States over the next three months are 0.4
percent down on last year, whereas they had been 3.4 percent ahead the day
before the travel restrictions were imposed.
The study also
showed that accumulated U.S. bookings to the Middle East were up by 12 percent
on last year in the three weeks before the ban. However, in the four weeks
following the ban they were down 27 percent.
Emirates and
Qatar Airways, two of the Middle East's biggest airlines, declined to comment
when asked about demand on U.S. routes.
According to
travel search site Kayak (PCLN.O),
searches from Europe for flights to the U.S. are down by 12 percent since the
elections. However, Germans, some of the world's biggest spenders on travel,
have not been deterred, with searches up 10 percent in that period, Kayak said
in data provided to Reuters.
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