President Donald Trump's temporary travel ban, overturned last week in court, is causing a large drop in U.S. tourism, according to The Boston Globe.
Flight searches from international locations to America were down anywhere between 6 percent to 17 percent, according to online booking websites, since Trump signed the order Jan. 27. Some experts even say the fallout could be as damaging to U.S. tourism as the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks were.
"The U.S. is in danger of taking the same path it took after Sept. 11, which led to a decade of economic stagnation in the travel and tourism sector," David Scowsill, president and CEO of the World Travel & Tourism Council, told the Globe. "Strict visa policies and inward-looking sentiment led to a $600 billion loss in tourism revenues in the decade post 9/11."
Trump's order, dubbed "Protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States," banned citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. for at least 90 days. It also suspended the refugee program for four months, banned Syrian refugees, called for new immigration screening procedures and directed the secretary of Homeland Security to conduct a 30-day review to determine which countries fail to provide "adequate information" for its citizens to be issued visas to enter the United States.
The ban was overturned by a judge in Washington state and upheld by an appeals court last week.
Jonathan Grella, the executive vice president of public affairs for the U.S. Travel Association, told the Globe it took "many years" for the "impression to be sent and received by our friends around the world that America was indeed open for business again" after 9/11.
"That's why we refer to it as the lost decade in our industry," Grella said. "That was obviously a very different scale, but if something gives people pause, they'll spend their vacation dollars elsewhere."
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