European tourists have begun avoiding the US: Accor CEO

French hotel group Accor SA has warned that forward bookings from Europe to the US are down 25 per cent this summer as travellers that feel put off by US President Donald Trump’s ’s crackdown on immigration divert to other locations. 

The company is seeing a “pretty strong deceleration” across the Atlantic, Chief Executive Officer Sébastien Bazin said on Tuesday in a Bloomberg TV interview. The drop is an acceleration from an 18-20 per cent decline in the first 90 days of the year, he said. Travellers are deciding to visit places such as Canada, South America or Egypt instead of the US, Bazin said. 

“It’s probably anxiety to go in an unknown territory,” Bazin said. While cases of people being detained at the border are anecdotal for now, they have nevertheless created a “bad buzz” that’s starting to show up in booking trends, he said. “You don’t need any bad buzz today,” Bazin said.

Transatlantic travel has long been a mainstay of airlines and tourism companies, counting as one of the most lucrative routes anywhere in the world. Now there’s a growing number of companies cautioning that the link has come under strain — with both US tourists tightening their belts and avoiding Europe, and Europeans circumventing the US for political reasons. 

While European airline executives said last week that there was no change in demand for now across the North Atlantic corridor, Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd sounded the alarm this week about a recent weakening of travel to the UK. That caused shares of transatlantic carriers such as British Airways parent IAG SA to slide. 

On Monday, Air Canada said bookings for transborder flights between Canadian and US cities were down 10 per cent for the April-to-September period, as Canadians respond to a brewing trade war by avoiding trips south. The shift is part of a larger boycott of American products in response to Trump’s tariffs and his repeated statements that he believes Canada should be part of the US.