Brand USA has a new campaign, a new content series, and a new fact-checking resource designed to tell the world that America is open for business.
What it doesn’t have is a particularly cooperative set of circumstances to market around.
The U.S. Travel Association‘s Spring 2026 forecast lays out the challenge: International inbound visits fell 5.5% in 2025 to 68.3 million — and that figure is still 18% below where it stood in 2019, when adjusted for inflation. A full return to pre-pandemic inbound levels isn’t expected until 2029. The FIFA World Cup gives the picture a temporary lift, with USTA projecting inbound visits growing 3.4% to 70.6 million in 2026, aided by the summer tournament — but one World Cup does not a recovery make.
The forecast explicitly flags “negative sentiment toward the United States in key source markets” as an ongoing risk. Perception problems like this aren’t fixed with the flip of a marketing campaign switch.
The Canada situation alone is instructive. Visits from America’s single largest inbound market cratered 21% in 2025. No amount of travelogue content about Monument Valley or Memphis (two markets Brand USA lauds in its new campaign) was going to move that needle, because Canadian travelers didn’t stop coming because they were confused about national park entry fees. They stopped coming for reasons that exist entirely outside Brand USA’s lane.
A Deloitte Consumer Industry Center report published earlier this year makes the structural tension even clearer. The policy environment Brand USA is working around — a new $250 visa integrity fee, proposed bond requirements worth several thousand dollars for some visitors, a Customs and Border Protection proposal to require five years of social media history from certain travelers — shows up in Deloitte’s own policy watchlist as a genuine headwind for inbound recovery.
Brand USA’s new “Get Facts. Get Going.” initiative was built to separate signal from noise, to be a single authoritative source on what entry into the U.S. actually looks like. It’s a smart idea, but there’s a difference between combating misperceptions and combating perceptions that are, at least partly, accurate. Travel advisors selling the U.S. to international clients are navigating that distinction every single day.
The economic backdrop doesn’t simplify things. Deloitte found that negative financial sentiment among Americans earning $200,000 and above — the cohort that drives premium and luxury travel spending — jumped from 9% to 15% between 2024 and 2025. USTA’s forecast notes that domestic leisure growth in 2026 is being propped up largely by higher-income households, while broader travelers shift toward shorter, cheaper, closer-to-home trips. The post-pandemic revenge travel era is giving way to something more cautious and more calculated, and international inbound travel is the segment most exposed to that shift.
To be fair to Brand USA, the organization is doing what it can with what it has — and that’s a lot less than what it used to thanks to last year’s funding cuts. President and CEO Fred Dixon is right that tools like Mobile Passport Control and expanded Global Entry access are making the entry experience smoother for travelers who clear those hurdles. The “America the Beautiful” platform has real reach — the organization’s own monthly surveys show more than seven in 10 respondents say the campaign positively influences their interest in visiting the U.S. The World Cup, America’s 250th anniversary, and the Route 66 Centennial give Brand USA a compelling events calendar to work with this year.
But Brand USA markets the country. It doesn’t make policy. And right now, the country’s policy environment is doing meaningful damage to the product Brand USA is selling — damage that a new content vertical and an updated FAQ page cannot fully repair.
USTA projects inbound international spending rebounds 1.6% this year to $178 billion. That’s growth, technically. It’s also still nearly a fifth below where it was in 2019.
Seven more years of “America the Beautiful” campaigns won’t close that gap if the entry experience keeps making international visitors feel like suspects rather than guests.
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