Western Europe, which is the fourth most popular travel destination for Americans, has increased its share of Thanksgiving bookings this year by 9.5 percent, according to Travelocity data. Eastern Europe, where the dollar goes a bit farther than in cities like Paris and London, saw a 24.6 percent surge in its share of bookings, Travelocity said. U.S. airlines are seeing similar trends in international travel for the 12-day Thanksgiving holiday rush.
Meanwhile travel from Europe to the United States is not increasing. Fareed Zakaria writes in the Newsweek article Unwelcoming America:
The most striking statistic involves tourists from Great Britain. These are people from America’s closest ally, the overwhelming majority of them white Anglos with names like Smith and Jones. For Brits, the United States these days is Filene’s Basement. The pound is worth $2, a 47 percent increase in six years. And yet, between 2000 and 2006, the number of Britons visiting America declined by 11 percent. In that same period British travel to India went up 102 percent, to New Zealand 106 percent, to Turkey 82 percent and to the Caribbean 31 percent.
Joerg Wolf is founder and editor-in-chief of the Atlantic Review (http://atlanticreview.org), a blog on transatlantic relations sponsored by the German Fulbright Alumni Association.
He currently works as editor-in-chief of the Open Think Tank atlantic-community.org in Berlin.
Joerg studied political science at the Free University of Berlin and worked as a research associate for the International Risk Policy project at the Free University’s Center for Transatlantic Foreign and Security Policy. He has been a Fulbright scholar at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and Washington DC and has worked for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Cairo and in Berlin.