Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at tourism, an important component of the New York economy. We’ll also get new details on how fast the collision at LaGuardia Airport unfolded on Sunday night.
In 2025, the first year of President Trump’s second term, fewer international tourists came to New York than the year before — about 400,000 fewer.
That figure, from the city’s tourism agency, mirrors a decline in international tourism that has been seen across the country since Trump returned to the White House. Visitors from countries the president lashed out at amid a trade war on allies and an immigration crackdown have stayed away.
Travelers from the United States made up the difference, and 2025 ended with a slightly higher total — 65 million, up 0.7 percent from 2024, according to New York City Tourism and Conventions, the city’s tourism agency. All told, the tourists who visited New York last year spent $55.6 billion, 4 percent more than in 2024, and were responsible for $7.5 billion in state and local taxes, 4.9 percent more than in 2024.
The foreign breakdown
Visits from Canada plunged 19 percent, according to the tourism agency. It said there were 13 percent fewer German tourists and 8.3 percent fewer French visitors last year.
“It’s a combination of the president’s bravado, or whatever you want to term it, and the upheaval in international relations,” said Sean Hennessey, a hotel consultant and an associate professor at New York University. “Tourism has rebounded from the Covid era, and we were easing out of the recovery phase and into a more sustainable ongoing level.”
But Anna Abelson, an adjunct professor at N.Y.U., said that foreign travelers were “looking at the U.S. differently now.”
She told my colleague Emma G. Fitzsimmons that the president had made tourists from Canada and Western Europe feel less welcome — and that the decline in international visitors had a disproportionate impact, because tourists from other countries tend to spend more than domestic travelers.
“Resilient despite global challenges” was how Julie Coker, the president and chief executive of New York City Tourism and Conventions, described the tourism picture for 2025 as her agency released its annual report.
FIFA and the 250th anniversary
Coker and other tourist officials see a slightly brighter picture for 2026: New York City Tourism and Conventions is projecting that 66 million people will visit this year.
The FIFA World Cup will hold weeks of matches in New Jersey and related events in New York this summer. The real estate analytics company CoStar said in January that the World Cup would provide “a temporary lift” to hotels for 11 host cities in the United States, and New York City Tourism and Conventions expects the World Cup to draw 1.2 million visitors to New York and New Jersey. It is predicting that they will spend $1.8 billion.
The 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence could also spur visits to New York City, where George Washington was inaugurated president of the new nation. (But not until 1789, after the Revolutionary War had been won.) A parade of tall ships will sail past the Statue of Liberty on July 4.
Hotel construction continues
The city ended 2025 with about 124,000 hotel rooms — roughly 2,500 more than in 2024, the tourism agency said. More hotels are being built: Some 24 projects are in “active development” through 2028. That will add more than 5,700 rooms to the total.
New York ranked first in hotel occupancy among the top 25 markets in the United States, the tourism agency said. It put average occupancy at 84.2 percent, well above the national average of 62.3 percent that was reported by CoStar.
The city also outpaced the rest of the country in average daily hotel rates. The average daily rate in New York last year was $334, compared with $160.54 nationally. The rate climbed 5 percent from 2024, according to the tourism bureau. CoStar put the comparable increase nationwide at only 0.9 percent.
Weather
Expect a partly sunny day with a high around 57 degrees. Tonight will be cloudy with a low around 44.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until April 2 (Holy Thursday, Passover).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I was hoping that at this stage, I would have something lined up.” — Erin Torres, who graduated from Barnard College in December and has had just four interviews after applying for nearly 200 jobs, a sign that the job market is the grimmest in years.
The latest Metro news
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ICE agents at airports: Agents were deployed at the three major New York airports as the battle continued over Department of Homeland Security funding, which has led to closed security checkpoints. The ICE agents’ exact duties at airports remain unclear.
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Junk removal specialists: Workers at Junkluggers, a company that tosses, donates or resells what New Yorkers leave behind, bear witness to grief and to lives in transition.
In 20 seconds, a disaster
It took 20 seconds for a routine landing at LaGuardia Airport to become a disaster on Sunday night.
Air Canada Express Flight 8646 was 100 feet above the ground when a controller in the tower at LaGuardia gave a fire truck permission to cross the runway — the same runway the plane was bearing down on. Eleven seconds later, the controller yelled at the fire truck to stop, Doug Brazy, a senior aviation accident investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board, said at a briefing about the crash on Tuesday.
The plane touched down a second after the stop command to the fire truck, too late to avoid a collision. The two pilots were killed, the fire truck was thrown on its side and debris was sprayed across the runway.
“When something goes wrong, it means many, many things went wrong,” Jennifer Homendy, the board’s chairwoman, said at the briefing.
Unlike fire trucks at many airports across the country, the one at LaGuardia lacked a transponder. That made keeping tabs on where it was difficult for the airport’s early-warning systems. Investigators do not know if the drivers heard the stop command from the controllers, which was repeated several times in the moments before the plane slammed into the truck.
The two controllers on duty were handling responsibilities that during busier hours would probably have been divided among more controllers. Homendy said that combining duties was common on night shifts, although the safety board had raised safety concerns about it many times. But she pushed back on the idea that distractions had played a role in the crash, saying it was too early to determine the dynamic inside the tower.
With the plane still on one of the runways at LaGuardia, the delays continue. The airport can handle only about half as many flights as usual.
But airlines have not canceled enough flights to match its diminished capacity, according to Kathryn Garcia, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport. Around 6 p.m. on Tuesday, FlightAware said that there had been 896 arrivals and departures at LaGuardia, only 110 fewer than on the same day a year ago.
Garcia said that she and other executives of the agency had been trying to persuade the airlines to cancel more flights to avoid having passengers arrive at the airport only to find their flights dropped at the last minute. The security line at Terminal B stretched through the huge building early in the morning, and airport workers told people at the back of the line that the wait would be two hours.
METROPOLITAN diary
At the Embers
Dear Diary:
It was the early 1960s, and we decided the hippest place to go postprom was the Embers, a nightclub on East 54th Street.
The prom ended around 10 p.m., and four couples, the guys in baby blue tuxedos and the girls in flouncy dresses, arrived at the club shortly after.
We had a reservation and were shown to a banquette, where the maître d’ personally took our drink orders: 7&7s or Singapore slings.
We listened to the jazz, smoked and were suave as hell. After a while, I signaled the maître d’ and asked for another drink.
He smiled.
“Sorry, no,” he said in a low voice.
“How come?” I asked.
“I didn’t ask anyone for ID and I’m not going to ask anyone for ID,” he said, again in a low voice. “You all got a drink. Let’s leave it at that.”
— Mike Maguire
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post More Tourists Are Coming to New York, but Not From Other Countries appeared first on New York Times.
