There are benefits to keeping travel domestic this year.
Tourism destinations in the United States are facing an uncertain year. Inbound international travel is anticipated to slump in 2025, partly based on a relatively strong U.S. dollar and many European governments advising their citizens to be cautious in traveling to the U.S. Some countries have even explicitly suggested their citizens keep their travels domestic, like former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did last month.
In 2023, U.S. residents took 98.5 million trips to destinations outside the United States—a number approaching the number who took foreign trips in 2019. That’s a small fraction of the number of domestic trips taken the same year, but the number of inbound international visitors is expected to decline year-over-year in 2025.
There are plenty of reasons to avoid foreign destinations in 2025. The Fodor’s No List outlines several of them: overcrowding and waste management in Bali, tourism protests in European destinations like Barcelona and Venice, congested scenic roads in Scotland. Five domestic destinations made the 2025 Fodor’s Go List: Badlands National Park, South Dakota; Los Olivos, California; Houston, Texas; Michigan’s Beach Towns; and Las Vegas, Nevada.
There are also several destinations in the U.S. facing the prospect of crowds, like understaffed national parks. But, on balance, there are more domestic destinations ready and raring for visitors—particularly if they’re experiencing a visitor slump in the aftermath of a natural disaster.
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There are benefits to keeping travel domestic this year. You won’t have to remember a passport, worry about a chilly reception abroad, or consider currency exchange rates and their effect on your travel budget.
But domestic travel could also be a salve for national unity in a time when Americans are deeply divided.
I’ve traveled to many domestic destinations over the past year. I’ve long been a big fan of the frequent stamping of passports, but I found my domestic travels thoroughly enjoyable—I daresay exactly as exciting as traveling internationally, without any of the drawbacks.
I discovered wines so distinctive near Boise, Idaho, that months later, on a trip to a wine region near Canberra, Australia, the wines I tried there tasted almost like twins, despite being separated by some 8,000 miles. I sampled oysters in Arcachon, France, and was reminded of a plate of oysters I had in Corpus Christi while the owner described how the discarded oyster shells are sun-dried and returned to the turbid waters of the gulf to create underwater habitat for sea life.
In Vicksburg, Mississippi, I was moved by how different, but how similar were the memorials conceived, financed, and erected by individual states to memorialize their Civil War soldiers at the Vicksburg National Military Park. I spent time in a number of historic homes, including Anchuca Historic Mission & Inn, which can share more than a few ghost stories, and wandered the blissfully uncrowded streets imagining what it must have been like when the Mississippi River was the main form of transport.
In Seattle, I browsed art by Indigenous artists who are pushing back on the trend of “native inspired” arts and crafts by non-Indigenous artists with a gallery and shop playfully tagged “Inspired Natives,” and I poked through locally made soaps, funky antiques, and locally-fired pottery in the quirky shops of Arroyo Seco, near Taos, New Mexico.
Many of the stories I discovered at domestic destinations were at times difficult to uncover. The National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas (the birthplace of the Pacific War’s Admiral Chester Nimitz) has a particularly moving exhibit told through the eyes of children living on the home front. One of the interactive displays puts visitors in the shoes of a 12-year-old girl of Japanese descent, deciding what to pack in her single allowed suitcase for her internment at a relocation center. To decompress, I spent time in the nearby Japanese Garden of Peace—a gift to the people of the United States from the people of Japan, pondering the paradoxes of the country’s diversity, considering the garden and museum are in a community with such strong German immigrant heritage that the town’s local newspaper was published in German until the late 1940s.
The American story has always been a fraught one, but it’s one worth discovering—especially at a time when tourism communities across the country, in states across the political spectrum, are depending on visitors for their livelihoods. My domestic travels were a reminder of many things: of how the excitement of foreign destinations can just as easily be captured closer to home, how international the character of this nation of immigrants remains, and how we memorialize the wounds of our past while hanging on to hope for the future.
Traveling in this country is wild, and fascinating and unexpected. Perhaps the takeaway is that a rewarding travel experience is often about going deep—but not necessarily going far.
