I have to admit, I didn’t think it would be this big:

Using forward booking data from a major GDS supplier, we’ve compared the total bookings held at this point last year with those recorded this week for the upcoming summer season. The decline is striking — bookings are down by over 70% in every month through to the end of September. This sharp drop suggests that travellers are holding off on making reservations, likely due to ongoing uncertainty surrounding the broader trade dispute.

Parts of Florida will be hammered by this. But I’m shocked: seventy percent plus! I hadn’t realized just how unified Canadians are in this.

I suspect it isn’t all the tariffs and Trump’s annexation threats: there’s been significant press of US border services snatching foreigners who are crossing legally but perhaps don’t have their paperwork all right and instead of just sending them back, abusing them and locking them up.

I certainly won’t be traveling to America, probably ever again: after all I’ve insulted Trump repeatedly and said that Israel is committing a genocide and customs officers often search social media. Nothing in America is worth the risk of wind up in some prison camp because I think Palestinians are human beings and shouldn’t be mass murdered.

So far I don’t see evidence of a big drop in European bookings, but if that happens, and there’s plenty of reason to believe in might, well… bad time to be in tourism in America and a good time to be in tourism in alternatives. I think Mexican and Canadian destinations are doing very well out of Canadian’s refusal to visit America.

America wants to be alone, and without allies, and soon it will be. Trump’s hilarious attempts to cozy up to Russia are ridiculous. Putin will do business with America, but he will never, ever trust the US, no matter who is President. Meanwhile America’s real allies are mostly deciding, quite rationally, that one can’t trust America and therefore America can’t be a useful ally.

This will lead to a variety of knock on effects, like diversification from the dollar and use of local currencies in trade, and the American standard of living will collapse by at least a third. Americans have been living way beyond their means, and Trump is bringing that to an end.

So sad.

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