r/dataisbeautiful • u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 • 4d ago
OC [OC] Non-US Citizens flying to the US from 2023-mid 2025
Created using matplotlib, pandas for some basic data restructuring, curl to download the data, pycurl to automate some of the process.
Source of the data is awt.cbp.gov from August 19th 2022 to August 18th 2025. Their policy is to make data of the last 3 years available, regardless of how much they have collected. I filtered out August 2025 data, as well as any data from 2022, since they were incomplete.
I often see rhetoric that the US visitor numbers are down this year, both in the news and by redditors who are in the industry (airports, hotels, restaurants and other tourism adjacent workplaces). I would also expect the numbers to be down, but I was curious about the numbers. I then remembered about the AWT website that I often use for travel purposes. I typically use it because I get anxious about immigration wait times, after an especially long wait time at JFK. While it provides a breakdown of average wait time for US citizens and non-US citizens, it also gives the number of flights that landed in the hour, as well as a very rough curve on the wait time (in units of 15 minutes), all in graphical format. It has been very useful to estimate immigration wait times at airports for me. Hopefully access to this information is not removed.
Analyzing the data has revealed a mixed bag; it's not easy to conclude anything from this data but there are certain correlations you can observe. I will note caveats first:
- This is only airports, so countries like Canada and Mexico, where people can take the land option aren't fully represented.
- This tool by CBP is used to estimate immigration wait times. Since the US forces everyone to go through immigration even if they are only in transit, the data doesn't fully represent actual visitors to the US. I am unsure of the ratio of visitors to the US vs transit, but I expect the vast majority are actual visitors, and a small, significant percentage are people in transit.
- The US has a significant, long term immigrant and non-immigrant population that will count towards the non-US citizen section of this data. This includes green card holders (~10-15M), H1-B visas (~1M), F-1 students (another 1M), not to mention the other categories in these visas. While this population contributes to tourism industry, their effect on travel is not immediately obvious, and will require waiting for long term trends to see in the data.
- Additionally, this is only "3" data points occurring at the tail-end of a world changing event. Obviously, the travel boom of the last few years make everything harder to predict and analyze.
Because of all these issues (that I only thought about after looking at the data), I was discouraged to find inconclusive results. Nevertheless, since I already generated this graph, I wanted to go ahead and share it. Please leave feedback on the visuals, and if you find any anomaly. I have double checked manually if the graph is accurate to the data, but you never know.
So what are the results from what I observe?
- Overall, compared to last year, non-US citizen visits to the US are mostly down, in between '23 and '24, except for a brief spike in April, and at the start of the year. The drop from Jan to Feb is steeper in '25 (~7.9M) compared to '24 and '23 (<5.1M). It's possible that this is because many rescheduled their flight after many articles came out in these months of people being detained and sent back (in the best case scenario). However, Feb generally sees a decline in travel so it's hard to say conclusively.
- Individual airports do not always follow this trend. For example, Washington Dulles, and San Francisco are both quite close to their 2024 numbers, before dropping off after May. Seattle-Tacoma is always higher in '25 than '24 and '23; nearly the same with Orlando. Some airports don't really see any change in their numbers comapred to previous years (e.g., Philadelphia, Charlotte/Douglas) --- these airports don't inform the larger trend because their contributions is quite small (peak 40K visitors per month). Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood Airport has much much lower numbers, to the point where I was doubting some data discrepancy (~40% less compared to '23 and '24 in some months).
- Obviously, the largest airport dominates the overall trend: JFK has nearly identical looking graph to the overall graph. And, the smallest airports have graphs that look nothing like the overall picture, for example, Austin (or St Louis, which looks insane).
- Of the smaller airports, one I found interesting was Fresno Yosemite International Airport that serves Fresno, Yosemite National Park, and Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks. This airport had a high number of non-US visitors in Jan (~10K) and Feb (~8.3K), and basically the opposite trend, but then it falls off after that. I find it unexpected because these national parks are best visited late spring/summer, certainly not in Jan/Feb when the roads will be iced. It's also high compared to the last two years. A quick glance at Wikipedia says they are expanding the airport from spring '23 which is expected to finish in Fall '25.
All airports here: US Airport Visitors
Let me know if you observe any other interesting aspect to the data.
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u/imironman2018 4d ago
Also do you have Vegas airport?
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u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 3d ago
This is a good question. I looked it up; the Harry-Reid LAS airport is international but I don’t see the cbp website store information on it for some strange reason
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u/imironman2018 3d ago
It has been in the news for having a significant drop in visitors from Canada and Mexico. I wonder what percentage of drop it is.
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u/RoboTronPrime 4d ago
I appreciate you visualizing the data as-is and explaining issues, limitations and unresolved questions to provide context. Too often, that context is missing and the data is presented as the end-all, be-all, which is very frustrating. I'm sure that someone will take this graph and get inspired to interpret and present it for their own purposes. Perhaps even get inspired to take your work and change it up. For example, it's easy to imagine that instead of the raw numbers presented as you have, someone will take the 2023 numbers and present the 2025 numbers as a percentage relative to 2023, month-by-month. In that context, the 2025 numbers are obviously show an increase over 2023 each month, but as others have commented, this doesn't account for the land-based traffic, this only goes back a few years.
Another consideration is that if people were planning their travel to the US for pleasure/tourism, I would imagine they have bought tickets, hotels, made arrangements with friends/relatives etc for some time. While some people may have altered their plans in response to the new administration's policies, it's likely that many people were somewhat locked in. It will be VERY interesting to see the effects in the coming months and years.
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u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 3d ago
Thank you. I was hoping for more comments on the visuals (well there was one other that complained this was too basic and thus only serves a political post). For data collected, cleaned up, and graphed with simple but clear visuals all in one-two days, this isn’t too bad.
That said, I was expecting one or two questions on the extra point to the left of January on each line. I wasn’t sure if everyone will quickly understand, but the extra point was to show the Dec value so it’s easy to compare against next year’s Jan value since this is best understood as cyclical data. Does it make sense? And if it not, what would be a good way to link the Dec value to the Jan value?
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u/WeUsedToBeNumber10 4d ago
My favorite is Orlando. The Mouse always wins!
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u/Jakemeister91 4d ago
I’d say it’s up because a new theme park opened at Universal as well. Brits love Orlando
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u/CGFROSTY 2d ago
I was in Orlando last month and it felt like half the people in Disney were Brits.
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u/JimiSlew3 4d ago
So, what is up with April? Seems to spike at multiple airports. Some event?
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u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 4d ago
No clue, and it's visible in so many airports too. I originally thought maybe around this time is when people became more relaxed about travel into the US, but it could also easily be some sports event or something international
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u/williamtowne 4d ago
Late Easter date. Made travel from Europe different compared to March.
Source
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u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 4d ago
That's a good point. But 2023 also had a late Easter. Maybe people were not comfortable enough to travel in 2023 yet, but were in 24 and 25.
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u/Foxhound199 3d ago
I know the Orlando answer at least. US spring breaks are wrapping up by beginning of April, and word has gotten out that is a very crowded time to go. But in the lull after that, British tourists descend en masse. I went once, and sometimes you'd swear they had opened Disney UK and you'd been teleported there.
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u/lollipop999 4d ago
People have to remember that tourists plan trips months and sometimes years in advance. Especially to a country like the US, which has such a long visa process. Most people are not going to cancel their trips because they already paid thousands of dollars and they won't get a refund. I think tourism will begin to decline towards the end of the year or early next year.
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u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 4d ago
Really good point. At most for these people, they will push back their travel plans but not necessarily cancel them
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u/bonbon367 4d ago
Someone already pointed out this data is flawed because it doesn’t include Canadians arriving by car (down about 37%)
It’s also excludes most Canadians arriving by air, since we go through pre clearance customs in Canada, and this is data from regular customs in U.S. airports.
It would be interesting to see if you could also find customs data for YVR, YYZ, YCC and YUL
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u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 3d ago
Maybe the Canadian side also keeps track and provides the info. Same would be true for other pre clearance customs countries like Ireland, though Canada would make the biggest impact
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u/kaizerdouken 4d ago
So basically no significant change
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u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 4d ago
It's not as easy to conclude, because of the caveats I have mentioned. The decline compared to last year is ~7-8%, grew to >20%, and is currently still hovering around 5%. Most people expected travel to increase further this year, including the transportation statistics annual report. So shrinking instead of growing is significant
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u/Badestrand 4d ago
well just by reading reddit it sounds like visitors dropped by 30-70% so in that context 5% is not really a lot.
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u/JuicyJfrom3 4d ago
well 2025 is sandwiched between 2024 and 2023 and follows the same pattern. It looks like noise of a consistent average or variance rather than a 5% drop.
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u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 4d ago
I don't think anecdotal evidence from Reddit should be easily dismissed. It's still possible that the visitors that do come only to go to the top tier places for tourism (so tourism becomes more competitive). This could contribute to the feeling of some places being empty. Of course, it could also be people saying what they want. But who would do that?
But in short, can't conclude with simply these charts. Just to show a quick example: the total under the curve for 2024 is ~47.6M, and typically 80M people visit the US. Half the people aren't even being counted here.
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u/KingSweden24 3d ago
I think there’s also significant local effects - Asian and European tourists might feel totally fine about seeing New York on a sightseeing tour whereas Canadians may not want to spend their money in Florida, for instance.
Anecdotally (sorry!) when I was in Europe in May (France/Germany) I didn’t get any sense that anybody I talked to there planned to avoid or not avoid the U.S. particularly
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u/manbeqrpig 3d ago
Anecdotal evidence is bullshit from this site because of the extreme political bias. The site as a whole is begging for tourism to be down so it scream into the void about Trump destroying the economy. So the comments will exaggerate the feeling of decline in a lot of places. It’s clear from the data that travel is down but it’s not this extreme situation like a lot of comments want you to believe
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u/kaizerdouken 3d ago
What is the standard deviation?
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u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 3d ago
Standard deviation for 3 points is pretty meaningless. I can still calculate it and let you know, but it won’t be very informative. Unless you mean standard deviation in a different axis, like across months, but then I don’t see if that is useful
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u/kicia-kocia 3d ago
Also these are all non-citizens, not only visitors. So the numbers include green card holders and residents of the US who go to visit their home countries.
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u/timmeh87 4d ago
Based on every other chart I have seen, 2023 did not yet recover to pre-covid numbers. take that however you want i guess but that seems to be the numbers. maybe travel is permanently different post covid. but it would be nice to see 2018 and 2019 on this chart
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u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 4d ago
They don't give access to data more than 3 years ago so I am afraid nothing to compare to. It would be interesting to see all years (they started giving access sometime in the 2010s so if somebody kept a copy, it would be possible)
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u/rosen380 4d ago
Maybe the way back machine would have older snapshots of the data?
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u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 3d ago
It doesn’t work that way with this service unfortunately. Wayback only stores preloaded html site data, not the actual database of the service.
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u/Tommy_Wisseau_burner 4d ago
I’m like 37.24% sure that the reason for not returning is because of inflation shock that happened directly after Covid. I have no proof to back that up but that’s the most logical conclusion I could make
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u/rclonecopymove 4d ago
Lots of business flying was reduced since COVID too as companies realised that a lot of meetings didn't have to be in person and could be done without the trouble of flying. That makes up another 23.73% to your 37.24%
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u/williamtowne 4d ago
What's the deal with Ft Lauderdale?
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u/caity1111 4d ago
Ft Lauderdale handles a LOT of Spirit flights to and from lesser known destinations in Central and South America. Might have to do with this.
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u/williamtowne 4d ago
That's probably it. Good catch. I had no idea it (Ft Lauderdale) was their hub and apparently 31% of all flights there. With Spirit ready to call it quits, it must be the reason.
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u/docdar 3d ago
Large Canadian snow-bird population in FLL. Many decided not to come this year.
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u/crimxona 3d ago
It's summer in Canada too, when the weather is nicer. Snowbird migration should typically happen in Oct/Nov which is a few months away. The Spirit Airlines struggles seem more realistic
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u/Online_Discovery 4d ago
Without looking it up, did they have some sort of storm/weather event? Possibly work being done at the airport which closed a bunch of gates?
It's an outlier for sure
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u/cscottnet 3d ago
Ft Lauderdale is also the destination airport for many cruises leaving from that port?
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u/ditchdiggergirl 4d ago
It might be interesting to select out subgroups of airports based on proximity to popular tourist destinations, to look for changes in discretionary vs business travel. Obviously major economic hubs like NYC, Chicago, San Francisco, etc will have plenty of both. But you might see different patterns in Orlando, Kona, New Orleans, and Aspen than you would see in St Louis, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, and Sacramento.
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u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 3d ago
Feel free to check out the full imgur album and share any interesting patterns you notice! https://imgur.com/a/us-airport-visitors-vMGwGDT
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u/quyksilver OC: 1 4d ago
Anecdotally, everyone I talked to in China in late May saw absolutely nothing wrong with the current administration.
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u/jaaagman 4d ago
What most liberal-types from western countries don't seem to realize is that a lot of countries are *very* socially conservative and are more closely aligned with the social policies of the American conservatives.
I do wonder if the tariff situation has somewhat changed the view of the Trump administration though.
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u/enoughbskid 3d ago
How do you account for staffing level changes at customs as well?
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u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 3d ago
Are you suggesting that the number of visitors may reduce depending on the number of customs staff? You have it backwards. While certainly possible to create a backlog, actually staffing and creating shifts is done based on number of people instead of people deciding to come based on available staff. But even if there’s fewer staff, people coming into the country aren’t just sent back; they have to wait longer to be processed. If you land in the US, that’s it; you have to go through customs and immigration.
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u/CosminFG 3d ago
I think the data is misrepresented by tbe airports, i would be very interested in knowing the actual " delay" in reported data from a big event like for example covid, but since they only keep 3 years of data we can't figure it. I would think it's a bigger drop.
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u/commentaror 2d ago
I'm proud of Seattle and welcome all non-citizens to the state of Washington. Come on over!
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u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 4d ago edited 4d ago
Adding the tool and data source again in the top comment, since I am not sure if the automod only looks at comments or the text in the post as well:
Created using matplotlib, pandas for some basic data restructuring, curl to download the data, pycurl to automate some of the process.
Source of the data is awt.cbp.gov from August 19th 2022 to August 18th 2025. Their policy is to make data of the last 3 years available, regardless of how much they have collected. I filtered out August 2025 data, as well as any data from 2022, since they were incomplete.
Edit: Also wanted to mention all international airports have been graphed here: https://imgur.com/a/us-airport-visitors-vMGwGDT some that I didn't include in this post
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u/LittleMsSavoirFaire 4d ago
Did you account for potential route changes? For example, the Ft Lauderdale airport is such an outlier I would think that some international routes may have been dropped.
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u/yoshizors 4d ago
Where are permanent residents/green card holders in this data? They are not US citizens, but their travel to visit family abroad is less likely to be impacted.
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u/Mikeshaffer 3d ago
The hell is going on in Ft. Lauderdale this year?
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u/crimxona 3d ago
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/21/spirit-airlines-lessors-bankruptcy.html
They are also one of the largest airlines at FLL
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u/Helios330 3d ago
Cool data, but kind of a weird choice to include Houston instead of DFW, the second busiest airport in the US…
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u/enoughbskid 3d ago
I’m suggesting that average wait times goes up with fewer workers, skewing your data.
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u/turb0_encapsulator 4d ago
what I have noticed in Los Angeles is that there are fewer European but not drop in tourists from Asia.
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u/m0llusk 3d ago
This isn't beautiful data, it is just a simple line graph here to broadcast a political point. If you want to score points for your politics here then you should at least jazz the graphics up a bit. As it is this is just yet another example that the current political climate is full of noise.
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u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 3d ago
I am glad you bring up the visuals, but what would you suggest to jazz it up?
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u/m0llusk 3d ago
Backing up a bit it is common to start by boning up on Edward R. Tufte's later works. And any of these top works may inspire: https://www.tableau.com/learn/articles/books-about-data-visualization
Specific to this I would dramatically thicken the lines to make them easier to see and to read the crossovers better. If possible at each point include some analysis of deviation to show a graphic representation of an actual analytic value to bring home the point.
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u/Odd-Entertainer-6234 3d ago
I suppose one useful value pertinent to the discussion could have been relative values/ratios to previous years, but it gets very crowded to set that up. Also, just because there’s only two data points to compare to, any kind of statistical analysis seems meaningless so I figured the only (valid) takeaway I can setup visually is that air travel in '25 is kind of between '23 and '24. Not much else to conclude here, as I admit in all the caveats I note in the post text
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u/Error_404_403 4d ago edited 4d ago
Bulk of the foreign tourists (like, 60% of all) are Canadians and the majority of them come to the US by car. The tourism reduction is mostly because of them, and it’s not shown in these charts.