You do understand there's also a downward spiral for tourism, right?
Tourism generated 1% of the GDP but you don't know the impact on other industries, you haven't seen figures on lost of tax revenue from jobs lost, cost of retraining people to find new jobs, burden on society from unemployment, etc.
I don't think that tourism will cease in the US but any downturn on it has larger effects than just the GDP figure brought by the industry itself.
Of course, if you only care about numbers the dollar figure won't look much, if you care about the lives affected by idiotic policies then you have to look deeper.
I never understood why US airports never implemented the transit concept.
Theoretically it could be extremely convenient to use the US as a transit point if your final destination is, for example, a country in Latin America.
But when you connect via any US airport you need to deal with imigration, pick up your luggage, deal with customs hassle, re-check your luggage and proceed through the entire TSA song and dance.
Depending on the airport not even 3 hours may be sufficient to make the connection and the hassle you experience is just not worth it.
For comparison: Some European airports have legal connection times of 30 minutes (Vienna). Longer than 90 minutes is almost unheard of.
Just about any international airport gets that concept, even in massively underdeveloped countries. The US just doesn't seem to get it.
It must cost US carriers dozen -, if not hundreds of millions in yearly lost revenues.
Because statistically nobody transits through the US. Almost everyone ending up in the US is staying. A lengthy flight across the Atlantic/Pacific to then take another lengthy flight across the other ocean is just not something many people do.
Tourism generated 1% of the GDP but you don't know the impact on other industries, you haven't seen figures on lost of tax revenue from jobs lost, cost of retraining people to find new jobs, burden on society from unemployment, etc.
I don't think that tourism will cease in the US but any downturn on it has larger effects than just the GDP figure brought by the industry itself.
Of course, if you only care about numbers the dollar figure won't look much, if you care about the lives affected by idiotic policies then you have to look deeper.