France is the most visited tourism destination of any nation in the world, with almost 90 million visits a year. The country’s financial minister says visits could temporality drop by 30% to 40% due to the coronavirus outbreak, which would decimate the industry. Certain parts of Italy have been quarantined. It ranks fifth on the list with 58 million travelers from overseas. Hard-hit China ranks fourth with 61 million. Thailand, another hard-hit country, ranks 10th with 35 million. The United States is third on the list at 79 million per year.

The American tourism industry is not evenly spread geographically. At least two locations are relatively small cities, where tourism is essential to a successful economy. This includes Las Vegas, the seventh most visited city in the United States at 43 million. Many of these visitors are people who live in the United States. Nevertheless, it faces a downturn, particularly if the virus begins to spread in America. Orlando, the U.S. theme park capital, ranks fifth with 48 million visits a month. The rest tends to be big cities like New York (60 million per year), Chicago (54 million) and Atlanta (51 million). The effect in these cities would be smaller but would hurt a number of companies.

Direct spending by tourists in the United States is about $750 billion a year, a meaningful portion of gross domestic product. A deep drop in this activity would definitely affect the American economy.

And tourism would add to the impacts of sales by consumer electronics companies and retailers hit by the disease in China because of a lack of supplies. Airline travel has been damaged. Part of this is tourism travel, but much is trips taken for business purposes. Add to these, the economic effect of falling oil prices and base metal costs, and across all these industries, the drop in revenue compared to gross domestic product becomes very significant.

Tourism revenue can be considered a canary in the coal mine. If the virus spreads in the United States, tourism’s impact will become a growing but relatively small part of the problem, except in certain cities.

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