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In the summer of 1976, my parents packed us into a car and drove to Florida.
I was a ten year-old from Mexico, and for two weeks, I watched the United States put on the greatest show I had ever seen.
First, Kennedy Space Center.
The rockets. The capsules. The raw, staggering evidence that human beings had pointed machines at the moon and gone there. I stood in front of those things and understood, in the way a child understands something before they have the words for it, that this country operated at a different scale than anything I had known.
Then, Walt Disney World.
The castle. The parade. The characters. The specific feeling of a place that had been built to make you believe anything was possible.
I came home in love with travel. And I came home in love with the United States.
That summer did more for the United States' image in the mind of one Mexican kid than any advertisement, any diplomat, any policy ever could. It was soft power in its purest form. The country simply showed you what it was, and you never forgot it.
In two days, the United States turns 250 years old.
The country that made me fall in love with travel is celebrating its 250th anniversary while facing something it has not faced since the pandemic: the world is quietly deciding it would rather go somewhere else.
According to the U.S. Travel Association, inbound international visits declined 5.5% in 2025 to 68.3 million, with a return to 2019 levels not expected until 2029. Four million fewer foreign visitors. More than $8 billion less in spending. The first annual decline since the pandemic collapse.
What makes this harder to dismiss is the context. Globally, travel kept growing. The world did not stop traveling. It just stopped coming here at the same rate.
Key source markets weakened too. Canada was down roughly 21%, and Germany was also down sharply. These are not fringe markets. They are two of the most reliable, highest-value source countries the United States has ever had.
This is not a partisan argument. It is a travel argument.
The pandemic hit every country on earth. Many of them spent the years that followed rebuilding their welcome. Updating their infrastructure. Retraining their hospitality workforce. Rethinking what the experience of arriving in their country felt like to someone who had chosen it over every other option.
The United States had the same opportunity. The homework was there to be done.
The numbers suggest it was not done with the same urgency the moment required.
A 250th anniversary is a milestone worth celebrating. The country that built those rockets, that created an experience so powerful it changed the trajectory of a ten-year-old kid's life, that country is still here and still capable of extraordinary things.
But soft power is not inherited. It is earned, continuously, by every person and every industry that shapes the experience of arriving, being welcomed, and going home changed.
Tourism professionals are not bystanders in this story.
They are the ones who build the itineraries that become the memories.
The ones who put the right traveler in the right place at the right moment.
The ones who, when they do their job well, send someone home the way I went home from Florida in 1976: converted for life.
The United States at 300 is still unwritten.
What it looks like will depend, in part, on whether the people who build travel experiences treat this moment as a warning or a brief statistical anomaly.
Until next week.
Alex
I Know Which One It Is
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