U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Newark Liberty International Airport.
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Some European firms are growing wary about sending their employees to the U.S.
It comes amid volatile policymaking by the Trump administration, more stringent immigration checks, and an uptick in reports of detentions and deportations.
Some businesses CNBC spoke to, in areas including engineering and accounting, stressed that their work trips to the U.S. continued unabated. But others, often in additional politically sensitive fields, flagged worker welfare concerns.
Their responses ranged from issuing recent travel guidance — akin to advising employees to bring wiped electronic devices or entering the U.S. via Canada — to encouraging attendance at U.S. events or conferences online where possible.
Business travel is a major revenue source for the U.S. economy. In response to a report published by the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) last 12 months, total spend within the sector generated a complete $421 billion and $119 billion in tax revenue in 2022, probably the most recent 12 months wherein full data was available. That got here from an estimated 429.9 million business trips supporting 6 million jobs.
Business travel can also be a key revenue-maker for the aviation industry, generating between 50% and 75% of profit for airlines in lots of cases.
In a survey of 900 global travel buyers conducted by GBTA in April, 29% said they expected a decline in business travel volume at their firms in 2025 because of this of U.S. policy across each travel and tariffs. The survey also found a decline in overall optimism within the sector.
Any chilling effect would also include international tourism expected to be dented this 12 months, costing $12.5 billion in spending, attributable to negative perceptions of trade and immigration policy.
Rising anxiety over U.S. travel
Border control and foreign visas have been highly charged issues since President Donald Trump took office in January, with reports of tourists being held in detention centres for long periods. The White House pledged in January that each one foreigners in search of to enter the U.S. can be “vetted and screened to the utmost degree possible.”
Relations between the U.S. administration and the tutorial community have also soured, following moves to pause international student visa issuance and “aggressively revoke” visas for Chinese students, in addition to the detention of some foreign students on apparently political grounds.
“We’re hearing some international travellers have expressed unease about visiting the U.S. attributable to increased visa scrutiny, social media monitoring, and incidents of detention or deportation despite valid documents,” said Prashray Kala, a partner at management consultancy Everest Group.
“Those with a visual online footprint are more cautious, especially with the ‘Catch and Revoke’ policy enhancing surveillance,” Kala said.
Announced April 30, this policy signifies that anyone with a U.S. visa will lose their immigration status after one strike for any violation of U.S. law, no matter severity.
One European fund manager who ceaselessly travels to the U.S. for business said he was concerned immigration authorities at airports could hinder his travel plans attributable to a change in political attitude, moderately than policy.
“Business travel on an ESTA [visa] isn’t any longer what it was”, the fund manager said.
‘These are things I take into consideration after I travel to China’
The pinnacle of a global non-government organization with headquarters in London told CNBC that they’d devised a brand new travel protocol for the U.S.
The policy goes beyond their usual requirements for details about an worker’s movements and speak to details, into issues around physical and knowledge security. The NGO produces investigative reports into topics spanning climate change, corporate malpractice and corruption.
Employees CNBC spoke to for this story requested anonymity to have the ability to debate internal workplace matters.
“On one level for us as a corporation, that shouldn’t really require us to interrupt right into a sweat, we try this for plenty of places that our staff travel to,” the NGO chief executive said.
“But from a private perspective, this may be very illuminating — in a not very nice way — because these are the forms of things I take into consideration after I travel to, say, China or Azerbaijan, autocratic regimes. The concept that we’d need to apply that approach to travel to the U.S. is something which might never have occurred to me until just a number of months ago.”
Examples include taking “burner” phones or computers only used for the trip, and preparing employees for scenarios wherein they’re aggressively questioned about their travel intentions or things they’ve published online, they said.
Individually, an educational researcher at a university in Switzerland told CNBC that they’d been supplied with guidance to ideally travel into the U.S. via Canada where possible, or to attend conferences virtually to avoid any visa complications.
They noted that a few of their colleagues were still making trips to the U.S. without incident, but others had been questioned on the border for longer, and a few had decided to not attend summer academic conferences stateside. Visiting programs to U.S. universities have been particularly affected and even placed on hold, they added.
All of those CNBC spoke to across a variety of industries agreed that the prevailing climate around U.S. travel was one among uncertainty.
“There may be, after all, a risk of overreacting to this … ploughing more of our time and resources into preparing for this than actual, tangible risk warrants,” the NGO chief said.
“There’s at all times this query of the way you separate out the outright bluster from what may be substantive and might actually be acted on. I feel probably this time around, we take more of the bluster seriously.”
— CNBC’s Ganesh Rao contributed to this story.
