May 29 2026 - 4:00pm
When Fifa President Gianni Infantino went on his World Cup sales pitch to American host cities, he promised them “104 Super Bowls”. Football fans were supposed to arrive in America this summer like a cavalry charge, draped in jerseys and carrying tiny plastic cups of $19 stadium beer, turning the 2026 World Cup into the largest international tourism bonanza that the United States has hosted in decades. Yet with the tournament beginning in two weeks, many host cities are staring nervously at half-filled hotel blocks and softer-than-expected international demand. Nearly 80% of hotels in US host cities are reporting bookings far below original forecasts, according to the American Hotel & Lodging Association.
The World Cup fiasco is, in miniature, the story of American tourism right now. According to a recent CNN analysis, international travel to the US fell 5.5% in 2025, amounting to roughly four million fewer international visitors and $14 billion in lost spending. Canada has led the tourism pullback with visits down more than 20%, while Germany fell 11.3% and declines stretched across much of the developed world, including India, France, Australia, Chile, and China. The US is still the top destination overall, but the Asia-Pacific region is the fastest-growing tourism region globally, with China hot on its heels.
Certainly, some of the US tourism struggles can be treated as a temporary economic problem, but this may signal something deeper: a soft-power recession in which America is no longer perceived as exciting, stable, affordable, or even as welcoming as it once was.
The liberal response has been — of course — to reach, immediately and gleefully, for the most readily available explanation: Donald Trump. CNN, for instance, pointed to “presidential rhetoric and policies” as the culprit. Some of that is too convenient. Tourism is a notoriously cyclical industry, and 2025 had no shortage of structural headwinds that can’t all be pinned on the President: airfare remains elevated; the dollar has stayed strong, making American trips expensive by international standards; and energy costs have kept family travel budgets tight on both sides of the Atlantic. The World Cup hotel crisis has its own specific villain — Fifa itself, which is using a dynamic pricing system that sets official box-office prices closer to secondary market rates.
However, tourism isn’t a reflection only of economics but also of perception. The world’s mental model of America gets frozen in whatever filtered version of events reaches people through their news feeds. It’s vibes, in other words, and vibes are downstream of narrative, and America’s narrative has taken a beating that no macroeconomic correction will fix overnight. The dominant global image of the United States overseas — fair or not — is now long TSA lines, political chaos, mass shootings, culture wars, immigration raids, tariff threats, and an executive branch that oscillates between performative menace and — at times — genuine menace.
The MAGA Right may dismiss tourism as trivial consumerism, the province of frou-frou European backpackers and wealthy Chinese nationals taking selfies in Times Square. Yet for decades, tourism functioned as one of America’s greatest ideological exports. During the Cold War, the US sold itself not simply through military might or GDP statistics but through sheer spectacle and abundance. Even people who despised American foreign policy often still dreamed of visiting New York, Los Angeles, Disney World, Las Vegas, Yellowstone, or some mythic Route 66 diner where the coffee cup was always full and the waitress called you “hon”. To vacation in America was to briefly inhabit modernity itself. That is soft power, in its purest and most effective form.
These days, international travelers are getting a firsthand look at America’s decline while receiving less for their money. They can pay $400 a night for a hotel room in a downtown American city, where the subway smells like melted pennies and the CVS toothpaste aisle is locked behind anti-theft plexiglass like it’s enriched uranium. The 2026 World Cup was supposed to help change these kinds of negative narratives. Thus far, however, it appears to be heightening them.
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