Travel in the United States: fewer foreign visitors, full national parks

How the country is laid out for a traveller

Distances decide how the United States is travelled. Long journeys between cities go mainly by air, and the only high-speed rail line that meets international standards runs along the Northeast Corridor. Amtrak, the government-sponsored passenger rail company, has a sparse network by Western European standards, concentrated in the Northeast, California, the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest. The rail network as a whole is very long, 182,412 miles, but it carries mostly freight.

The road is the ordinary way to see the country. Congress began paying for roads with the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, and in 1919 an army convoy needed 62 days to drive 3,200 miles across the country, sent to find out how hard such a trip would be for military vehicles. In June 1956 Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act, which paid for the Interstate Highway System through a fuel tax. The first contract signed under it upgraded a section of US Route 66 in Missouri into what is now Interstate 44. An older road is sometimes called the grandfather of the system: 162 miles of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, now part of Interstates 70 and 76, opened on 1 October 1940.

The Interstates were built as freeways with national standards for construction and signs, and most routes were new. In dense cities the routing destroyed many established neighbourhoods, often on purpose as part of urban renewal. The original system was declared complete in 1992 at a cost of about $114 billion. The network is 48,890 miles long, the states own the roads inside their borders, and about a quarter of all vehicle miles driven in the country were driven on it as of 2022.

Clocks change along the way. The states, territories and other possessions span nine standard time zones, and most of the country moves its clocks forward for daylight saving time from spring to autumn.

Who visits the United States and from where

The International Trade Administration counted 68.3 million international visitors in 2025, down from 72.3 million in 2024 and short of the record of 79.4 million set in 2018. It was the first fall since 2020, and arrivals were below the previous year in ten months of 2025. January 2026 was lower again, by 3.5% against January 2025.

The fall was uneven. Among the twenty countries sending the most visitors, nine sent more than in 2024 and eleven sent fewer. Arrivals from Israel rose 15.6% and from Argentina 14.9%, while arrivals from Canada fell 20.9% and from Germany 11.3%. Arrivals from Mexico grew 6.4%, after rising 17.6% between 2023 and 2024.

The Congressional Research Service lists the reasons observers give: long waits for visa interviews, stricter border and immigration policy, possible tariffs, a strong dollar and travel restrictions on nationals of some countries. The World Travel and Tourism Council put international visitor spending at about $176 billion in 2025, down 4.6%. The reconciliation act of 2025 also cut the cap on federal matching funds for Brand USA, the public and private body that promotes the country abroad, from $100 million to $20 million.

Tourism matters to the economy all the same. The Bureau of Economic Analysis found that travel and tourism produced $840 billion in value added in 2023, 3.03% of gross domestic product, and supported 10.0 million jobs, 6.5 million of them directly. The country co-hosted the 2026 FIFA World Cup with Canada and Mexico, with 11 of the 16 host cities in the United States. In the New York and New Jersey region, where eight matches were played, the tournament produced $3.5 billion in economic impact from more than 1.2 million visitors to stadiums and fan events, but it did not bring visitor numbers back to the level of the late 2010s.

How tourism grew from railways to jet travel

Tourism was established as a pastime and an industry by the 1850s, but it depended on the railway. By 1840 the country had 2,800 miles of track, by 1860 every major eastern city was linked, and in 1869 the first line crossed the continent, so that people in the East and Midwest could reach the West Coast. Yosemite was promoted to tourists from the late 1850s, and photography, used for the first time to sell destinations, spread hundreds of pictures of places of interest. New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington and San Francisco were all drawing visitors by the 1890s. Package tours appeared in the 1870s and 1880s, and nineteenth-century guidebooks sent readers to see new prisons, asylums and schools for the deaf and blind, institutions with no earlier model.

The car opened travel to people beyond the upper and middle classes. In 1900 the country had 8,000 registered cars, and by 1911 it had 619,000; after Ford began cutting the price of the Model T from 1913, many more families could afford one. As more families travelled by car, hotels failed to cater to them, and in 1952 Kemmons Wilson opened a motel for them in Memphis, Tennessee. Thousands of tourists visited Florida in the early 1900s, but tourism became the state's largest source of income only after the Second World War, drawn by beaches, warm winters, fishing and boating. Architects built Art Deco hotels in Miami Beach in the 1930s, and the district still draws visitors. Walt Disney World opened near Orlando in 1971, and Florida received 100 million tourists in 2015.

Air travel changed the scale again. Between 1945 and 1969 airliners grew from 28 seats and under 200 miles an hour to 150 seats at 600 miles an hour, and by the 1950s flying was part of everyday life for many Americans. Late in the century the states began selling themselves with slogans, among them "I Love New York" and "Virginia is for Lovers".

Where the national parks came from

The painter George Catlin suggested a nation's park during a trip to the Dakotas in 1832. Congress created Yellowstone National Park on 1 March 1872, the country's first. Wyoming was then a territory with no state government to run it, so the army managed the park, including African American units known as Buffalo Soldiers.

A publicity campaign led by the businessman and conservationist Stephen Mather produced the National Park Service, created by the Organic Act that Woodrow Wilson signed on 25 August 1916. The act told the service to conserve scenery, historic objects and wildlife and to provide for their enjoyment in a way that would leave them unimpaired for future generations, and Mather became its first director. In 1933 the War Department's historic sites, including Civil War battlefields, passed to the service.

The system now has 433 areas covering more than 85 million acres in every state, the District of Columbia and the territories. National parks are only one kind: the service also runs monuments, battlefields, historic sites, lakeshores, seashores, recreation areas, scenic rivers and trails, and the White House. Its sites range from Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve in Alaska, at 13.2 million acres, to the Thaddeus Kosciuszko National Memorial in Pennsylvania, at 0.02 acres. About 20,000 permanent, temporary and seasonal staff run it, with more than 131,000 volunteers in 2025. Only a quarter of the parks charge an entrance fee.

A visit usually needs some planning. Besides the passes for single parks, interagency passes cover many federal sites, and they are free or discounted for members of the military, older visitors, fourth-grade schoolchildren and people with a permanent disability. Campgrounds in many parks are booked through Recreation.gov, while others are first come, first served, and tours such as those at Pearl Harbor National Memorial, the caves of Mammoth Cave and Independence National Historical Park can be reserved the same way. Service dogs may go anywhere in a park that visitors can go. Driving off the road is illegal in many parks and regulated where it is allowed.

How many people visit the parks

The service recorded 323,014,305 recreation visits in 2025 across the 406 parks that report figures, with 13,016,577 overnight stays and records set at 26 parks. The total was down from 331,863,358 in 2024, in a year that included a 43-day partial government shutdown, which the service called the longest ever.

Roads and recreation areas count as park sites too. The Blue Ridge Parkway, a scenic road through the Appalachians, had 16,533,753 visits in 2025 and Golden Gate National Recreation Area in San Francisco 15,748,676.

The parks carry local economies. A study by the service found that 331 million visitors in 2017 spent $18.2 billion in the areas around the parks, supporting 306,000 jobs.

Which places UNESCO lists in the United States

The United States ratified the World Heritage Convention on 7 December 1973, and 27 of its properties are on the World Heritage List: 13 cultural, 13 natural and one mixed, Papahānaumokuākea. Sixteen more sites are on its tentative list.

The cultural sites cover Indigenous and colonial history: Cahokia Mounds, the Chaco Culture sites, Mesa Verde, Taos Pueblo, the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks and the Poverty Point earthworks, the San Antonio Missions, La Fortaleza and San Juan in Puerto Rico, Independence Hall, Monticello and the University of Virginia, the Statue of Liberty and the twentieth-century buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright. The natural sites are mostly national parks, among them Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the Everglades, Hawaii Volcanoes, Mammoth Cave, Olympic, Redwood and Carlsbad Caverns. Two are shared with Canada: Waterton Glacier International Peace Park, and the mountain parks of Kluane, Wrangell-St. Elias, Glacier Bay and Tatshenshini-Alsek.

What entry to the United States requires

Citizens of the countries in the Visa Waiver Program can visit for tourism or business for 90 days or less without a visa. The State Department lists 42 participants, most of them in Europe, along with Australia, Brunei, Chile, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Qatar, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. Each traveller needs an approved Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA, from U.S. Customs and Border Protection before boarding a plane or ship to the country, and approval does not guarantee entry: officers at the port decide who is admitted.

The waiver has exceptions. Nationals of participating countries who have been to North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria or Yemen since 1 March 2011, or to Cuba since 12 January 2021, must apply for a visa, as must dual nationals of several of those countries. A short trip to Canada, Mexico or a nearby island does not restart the 90 days. Travellers from other countries need a visitor visa, and the 2025 reconciliation act added new visa and admission fees.

Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands have a separate arrangement: citizens of Australia, Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and several other places can visit both without a visa or an ESTA if they complete a form before travelling.