A start-up measured the change in demand for international flights to the United States three weeks before Donald Trump was inaugurated as president of the United States and one week after he took office. The result is eloquent.
For airlines, the arrival of Donald Trump at the White House is not a good deal. Hopper, a Canadian start-up for predicting airline ticket prices, had fun comparing the evolution in one month of the demand for international flights to the United States, the second most visited country in the world behind France.
Comparing the flight searches observed three weeks before the inauguration of Obama’s successor and those recorded one week after he took office, Hopper notes a clear deterioration in the attractiveness of the « United States » destination: -17%, on a global scale. “Search searches declined in 94 of the 122 countries where we have enough data to draw conclusions,” Hopper said in a statement posted online.
“Search searches for flights from internationally to the United States have all fallen, but some cities in the East of the country are holding up a little better, such as New York, Boston and Detroit. San Francisco and Las Vegas are the cities losing the most interest among international travelers,” specifies the start-up.
Unsurprisingly, in the countries affected by Donald Trump’s anti-immigration decree – Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen – they fell by 33%. For comparison, this time last year, the decline in demand was only 1.8%. On the other hand, much more surprisingly, searches from Russia soared by 88%. In France, searches for the United States fell by 8%.
