US-Europe Tourism Trade Gap Reaches Two-Decade High Amid Strong Dollar

The tourism-related trade gap between the United States and Europe is the highest it has been in more than two decades.

With droves of Americans flush with cash flocking to the European continent, 2023 brought a $27.3 billion tourism-trade deficit, according to a Reuters report of data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

That’s the largest travel deficit between the U.S. and Europe since the 2000s and it’s also 66 percent more than the deficit between the two locations just one year earlier, in 2022.

The news follows decades of a relative tourism trade balance between the U.S. and Europe. What’s more, in 1999, the U.S. had a tourism trade surplus of $1.4 billion, which means Europeans spent more in this country than Americans did when visiting Europe.

The deficit is likely being driven by a variety of factors, Reuters reported, among them, a strong dollar and steep prices in the United States for goods and services. The cost of hotels, restaurants and more are all lower throughout Europe.

But the news outlet says the strong dollar is only part of the reason why the deficit is widening for international visitors to this country. With the U.S. economy humming along, Americans have plenty of money to spend. That means more U.S. tourists are heading to Europe for vacation than there are Europeans headed to this country.

Last year, that reality created a tourism trade gap of 7 million, which amounted to the largest such gap since 2012, per the U.S. National Travel and Tourism Office.

All of the American tourists visiting Europe are helping to put economies there into overdrive. Real estate data provider CoStar found that the average daily rate for a hotel room in Italy increased 42 percent between 2019 to May 2024 to $210, according to Reuters.

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