Economist Writing Every Day

I had planned to write about the Trump-BLS fight today. But considering that two of my co-bloggers have already written about this (Mike on Monday and Scott on Tuesday) and that I have written about supposedly “fake” jobs numbers before several times (see January 2024 and August 2024), I will hold off on that topic until all of the dust settles. But this is a very important topic, and I believe Trump is clearly in the wrong (as is Kevin Hassett, see my tweets from this week), so please do continue to follow this topic and sane voices on it (see a Tweet from Ernie Tedeschi and from me for a long-run perspective on data accuracy).

But now, on to something a little more light-hearted: is everyone traveling to Europe these days?

Judging by my Facebook feed, it seems that Yes, lots of people are traveling to Europe. But this could be a result of selection bias in at least two ways: the people I am friends with on Facebook, and what people choose to post about on Facebook.

So what does the hard data say? We actually have pretty good long-run data on this question. In short: yes, lots more Americans are traveling to Europe (and overseas generally). Though don’t worry: not everyone went to Europe this summer, despite what social media might have you believe.

For starters, here’s a chart showing three decades of US overseas travel:

Definitions first: this data comes from the US International Trade Administration. It is a count of the number of US citizens taking outbound flights outside of the US to “overseas” destinations. Crucially, “overseas” means anywhere other than Canada or Mexico (or, of course, any US states or territories). This is not a perfect definition (trips to the Bahamas count as overseas travel, but not trips to the US territory Guam or Canada’s Yukon territory), but it’s close enough for our purposes here.

From the chart, we can see a few key facts. First, in 2024, about 6.5% of the US population traveled to Europe, and another 9.3% traveled to non-Europe overseas destinations. These are both record highs. Based on the first 5 months of data in 2025, close to 7% of the US population will travel to Europe this year, and almost 10% will travel to other overseas destinations (for the curious, the Caribbean is the second largest travel region after Europe, with Asia a distant third place). This means that 1 out of every 6 Americans is engaging in international travel — perhaps, because these are not unique counts of visitors, and undoubtedly some Americans make multiple trips per year and thus are counted more than once.

If about 7% of Americans visit Europe in 2025, as the early data indicates, it would be double the amount that were traveling to Europe just over a decade ago in 2011, when it was 3.5%. Even if there is some double counting here for frequent travelers, this represents an enormous increase in travel and suggests robustly rising living standards and incomes. Note also there had not been that much increase between 1996 and 2013 — a travel stagnation of sorts (and the pandemic crash is obvious in the data too).

Can we extend the data back before 1996? Indeed we can. In fact, we can extend it all the way back to 1820 — though the region-specific data separating out Europe only goes back to 1919 (as far as I could find):

Note that in this chart I switched to a logarithmic scale, because in the past, especially before WW2, international travel by Americans was extremely rare. You wouldn’t even be able to see the line if I used a linear y-axis. It wasn’t until 1851 that the proportion of Americans traveling abroad each year even reached 0.01% — that is, 1 out of every 1,000 Americans. And it took another half century to reach 2 out of every 1,000 Americans in 1901. It wasn’t until 1963 that it would reach 1 out of every 100 Americans traveling overseas, and not until 1969 that 1 out of every 100 Americans were traveling to Europe.

Since 1970 — the end of a “golden era” of both prosperity and air travel in some imaginations — travel to Europe by Americans has risen more than 5-fold. Again, it is possible that some of the rise in travel to Europe is reflecting inequality, with the rich taking multiple trips per year. But to come back to my Facebook anecdotes, no one in my social circle is in the top 1%, and most of their parents never traveled to Europe either by the current age of my peer group.

Finally, what about the reverse? Europeans traveling to America? I won’t present a long-run historical series, but you may have heard that travel by Europeans this year plummeted, possibly due to Trump’s policies. This appears to be mostly untrue, and was caused by early data in March 2025 that was skewed downwards and bounced back in April, mostly due to (I believe) the timing of the Easter holiday. While travel from Western Europe in the first 6 months of 2025 is about 2% lower than 2024, it’s not 20-30% lower, as some of the early data indicated.

Sources for the charts? I was greatly aided by the paper “The long-term rise in overseas travel by Americans, 1820-2000,” which as a working paper carried the creative title “The American Invasion of Europe.” While I did end up searching out all of the data for myself again, that paper was useful in identifying the best sources. I used Historical Statistics of the United States for much of the data from 1820-1970, including both the Millennial edition for 1820-1897 and 1909-1918, and the 1976 edition (because it had the regional data) for 1919-1970. There was a gap in the HSUS series, which I filed in with a 1956 US Foreign Commerce Bureau report. From 1971-1995 I used various editions of the Statistical Abstract, and as mentioned above 1996-present is from the US ITA.