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International travel to the US keeps sliding. Visits fell for the 8th straight month.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

The US isn’t the tourist destination it once was.

Visits to the US by international travelers declined for the eighth straight month in December, according to data released earlier this month by the National Travel and Tourism Office.

In 2025, visits to the US were down among 10 of the top 20 overseas tourist-generating countries, including India, Germany, and South Korea.

The decline is a sustained blow to the travel and tourism industries, which in 2024 supported more than 15 million jobs, and generated about $1.3 trillion in economic output — including $181 billion from inbound international travel.

Major tourism hubs like Las Vegas are seeing widespread layoffs due to the downturn, forcing workers to get creative with their career pivots. Business Insider reported earlier this month that laid-off hospitality workers contributed to a 55% increase in dancer auditions at a Las Vegas strip club compared to the prior six months.

It doesn’t appear the travel bug has gone anywhere — just that international tourists are avoiding the US.

In Australia, for example, overseas arrivals and departures data released Friday by the country’s Bureau of Statistics shows that international travel returned to pre-pandemic levels just before the lockdowns began in 2020. Australians travelling to Canada rose 4% in the last year, 10% more visited India, and visits by Australians to China and Japan rose 20% and 21%, respectively, but 3.2% fewer booked a trip to the US.

Fewer Canadian travelers are visiting the US, as well, opting instead to go further south to Mexico, Business Insider reported last April.

Complicating demand were ongoing trade frictions, tariff battles, and geopolitical unease, which helped fuel grass-roots boycotts of US goods and, in some cases, changes in travel plans.

European travel firms and analysts pointed to tariff-driven consumer backlash and growing anti-American sentiment as factors that contributed to early-year softness in bookings, even as demand showed signs of rebounding later in the summer.

Domestic travel has helped cushion the blow so far, with the US Travel Association projecting that domestic leisure travel was forecast to grow 1.9% to $895 billion in 2025.

However, if international visitors continue to stay away, destinations that depend on overseas spending — from iconic tourism cities to national parks — could feel growing pressure as the US heads into a high-stakes stretch of global events in 2026 and beyond.




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I moved from Spain to Florida 21 years ago. My first marriage fell apart, but I met the love of my life.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

Twenty-one years ago, I faced the difficult decision to move from Spain to the United States with my 3-year-old daughter and 4-month-old baby to follow my then-husband, who had lost his job, in pursuit of a new position in Florida.

I was being asked to leave behind my family, friends, and an established writing career. I was to start over at 41, with no connections, no guarantees, and an already shaky marriage.

My family thought it was a terrible idea, yet my husband’s family felt it was a great opportunity. So, after some soul-searching and many promises of a better life in Florida, I decided to uproot my kids and take the chance.

As I boarded the plane to meet my children’s father (he had come to the US ahead of us), I had mixed feelings: I could feel the excitement of my eldest to see her dad again, but I also feared the unknown. I kept asking myself whether it was really possible that we could fix our marriage and thrive in a different country.

My worst fear came true

Going from living in a penthouse in the old part of Sevilla, where I could walk to just about everywhere, to being cooped up in a tiny apartment in a gated community in suburban Florida, where I needed a car to go anywhere, was brutal to my nervous system.

I felt trapped in suburbia without my own car. And with a history of major depressive disorder, I started having panic attacks and depressive episodes. One day, while driving my children to find a preschool for my eldest, I had to pull over to sob.

A few months later, my husband lost the job we had moved to Florida for. And so began one of the most difficult periods of our lives.

In four years, we moved several times within Florida, always because of his new jobs. I found work freelancing for newspapers and magazines and wrote more books for publishers in Spain. But our relationship was always floundering.

As our marriage crumbled, we took a time-out under the same roof. We went to marriage counseling, enrolled in self-improvement seminars, and so on. Trust, respect, and admiration had been completely lost, and in 2008, when the Great Recession hit, we had no money, no savings, and no jobs.

I walked away from my husband with my laptop, my books, joint custody of our children, and the huge regret of having moved so far away from my family and friends. But I stayed in Florida, because I didn’t want my children to be far from their father. From one day to the next, I found myself a single mother on food stamps.

I met the love of my life

Nearly a year after separating, 16 years ago, I met the love of my life. We had many similarities: we were both newly single, bilingual and bicultural, and had children of a similar age. We were writers focused on creating a better life for our kids and ourselves. The best part was that neither of us had given up on love despite the tough times we’d lived through.


Family posing with kids

The author fell in love again in Florida.

Courtesy of the author



For nearly two years, we dated long-distance, spending only weekends and holidays together. One of us would drive two hours to meet the other, sometimes with the children, and when the kids were with our respective former spouses, we met alone.

We were both trying to rebuild ourselves personally and professionally, and together we made a great team. I once again moved for love, but this time with no regrets. Four years later, we married at sunset on the beach, surrounded by our children and close family.

Our kids are all in their 20s now, and we’ve been through the highest highs as well as some pretty rough times. But our relationship was never in question. We’ve cheered each other on and thrived together.

Whenever I think of past regrets and how I shouldn’t have moved to the US 21 years ago with my ex, I realize I would have missed out on finding true love. And I would never have built the stable and dependable family I always wanted.




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Bull

This skinny house is so narrow that some people can touch both walls at once — and its price just fell again. See inside.

by with No Comment Xpandfy

  • A Washington DC developer was forced to build a skinny home — six feet wide at its narrowest point.
  • Zoning laws made it hard to build any bigger on the 0.02-acre property, the listing agent said.
  • The narrow home listed for $799,900 in July 2023, but the price just dropped further to $570,265.

A real-estate developer in Washington, DC, had a small canvas to build a modern home.

Now there’s a 10-foot-wide, one-bedroom skinny home on what used to be a driveway.

It’s for sale for $570,265 — an almost 29% price reduction from the $799,900 it was asking when it first hit the market in July 2023.

Jennifer Young, the home’s listing agent with Keller Williams Chantilly Ventures, said zoning laws changed shortly after developer Nady Samnang purchased the 0.02-acre property, so they had to either scrap the idea of building a home or tighten their floor plan.

“It literally came down to sometimes a centimeter of getting the exact measurements right to both comply with DC zoning and build a really nice home that was functional,” Young told Business Insider.

Samnang, a contractor bought it in 2021 for $200,000, according to the Zillow listing.

Samnang, tasked with figuring out how to build a narrow home on a driveway in between two alleys, told The Washington Post that the design went through many iterations and took nearly seven months to get approved by the city’s permit office.

“I wanted to quit so many times,” he told the Post.

The skinny house has drawn interest from people across the country.

“It’s one of the most-viewed homes on Zillow that I’ve ever seen in my career,” Young said. “We do have quite a bit of looky-loos, but we have a lot of first-time buyers looking and investors — people that want to Airbnb it or rent it to college kids.”




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