Editorial: Domestic tourism likely to roar back in 2025. Is Chicago ready?

Americans traveled abroad in record numbers in 2024. That was partly a consequence of aspirational trips being delayed by the pandemic, partly the long-term shift in spending toward experiences and partly a perception that bargains could be had outside U.S. borders.

In July, a U.S. dollar bought more than 160 Japanese yen, more than 60% higher than was the case as recently as 2020, meaning Japan was on sale for foreign visitors. The exchange rate change with the euro and the British pound was less pronounced; nonetheless, anyone with a long memory of going to London knows that the $1.23 to the pound obtainable last spring was historically a good deal.

Those deals have become less attractive. One consequence of the Federal Reserve’s cutting interest rates by a full half point last week, with the explicit promise of more to come, was a fall in the value of the dollar, which is great for U.S. exporters but bad for U.S. tourists.

The Bank of England, taking a more cautious attitude by saying it needed to see more data to feel comfortable that inflation’s curse had been tamed, left U.K. interest rates the same Thursday at 5%, a little above the Fed’s new 4.75% to 5% range. Mostly as a result of that interest rate disparity, the pound surged against the dollar and euro, even as British stocks slipped, hitting a two-year high and meaning everything in London just got more expensive for U.S. tourists. And the days of 160 yen to the dollar are gone. On Friday, a dollar bought only 143 yen, comparatively adding some 10% to every restaurant check or Shinkansen train ticket.

American tourists found another problem this past summer too: massive overcrowding in popular destination cities.

Venice introduced a kind of congestion charge for visitors, a gesture aimed at limiting the number of tourists on peak days. That seems mostly to have been ineffectual, but it’s indicative nonetheless of many cities wrestling with a problem that typically pits tourist-dependent businesses against local residents. Cruise ships are seeing new limitations popping up in terms of how many ships the most popular port destinations are willing to allow. And you only had to see the photos from the beautiful Greek island of Santorini this summer, choked with sunset-seeking revelers, to know the over-tourism problem is real.

Chicago, though, is not over-touristed. Not by a long way.

In 2023, Chicago saw 51.96 million “tourists,” a 6.9% increase from 2022 but still a hefty 15.6% below pre-pandemic 2019. And many of those tourists are not vacationers, per se. Even fewer are internationals. According to the tourism agency Choose Chicago, Chicago had about 1.2 million overseas visitors in 2023, still well below the 1.45 million who visited in 2019. As a result, Chicago still is talking about “recovering” its overseas tourist base when other places are worrying about how to keep a lid on their international visitors.

Chicago’s international numbers are especially low when you consider the formidable presence of O’Hare International Airport. But most of the major European leisure airlines — Iceland’s Play, Britain’s Virgin Atlantic, the Swiss Edelweiss Air, the Lufthansa subsidiary Discover Airlines, Germany’s Condor — don’t currently fly to Chicago, even though they do fly to multiple other U.S. visitor-friendly cities, disgorging hundreds of tourists each and every time.

Still, plenty of mainstream airlines do fly to O’Hare and Midway from innumerable destinations, and opportunities are ripe for 2025.

Major carriers have to make decisions far in advance, and the picture for international flying to Chicago next summer is a mixed bag with some additional international destinations (the ones that get news releases and stories) and some retrenchment. Notably, American Airlines has shortened the summer window during which it will fly nonstop from Chicago to Barcelona, Paris (once a year-round destination) and Dublin, and it is canceling its daytime flight to London, much liked by the jet lag-averse. On the plus side, American has added nonstop service to Madrid for 2025, and United will fly Chicago to Reykjavik. Another positive is Cathay Pacific’s decision to make its Hong Kong nonstop a daily flight, beefing up the possibility of more Asian tourists, at one time a more familiar sight on Chicago’s streets.

We’ve talked in the past about the factors that attract international and domestic tourists: global marketing, a perception of safety, new attractions, big events, a city with a great story to tell. This year’s Democratic National Convention certainly helped with most of those issues, especially within North America. But the city also has to work on things that specifically attract overseas visitors: Formula One, for example, has broader international appeal than NASCAR; soccer is a global game, and yet Chicago will host no World Cup games in 2026, having unaccountably allowed Kansas City to snatch its natural Midwestern foothold; despite its famously robust arts and food scenes, Chicago has few festivals with a genuinely global magnetism. Potential, yes. Proven draw, not so much.

But as anyone who saw out-of-town news reports during the DNC knows, the city does have its extraordinary natural beauty as a way to impress visitors along with its friendly people. And in an era when New York hotel rooms routinely cost more than $300 a night, Chicago has affordability as an asset, too. Next year, many Americans will be vacationing within the U.S., and Chicago needs to get prepared to grab its share. But just as the falling dollar makes staying closer to home more attractive for Americans, the reverse is true for internationals.

Each generation of visitor — wherever they are from — has to discover Chicago’s beauty for themselves, and the city often makes the mistake of thinking everyone already knows.

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