Why This Travel Writer Won't Be Boycotting the US This Year

Advertisement Opinion Why I won’t be boycotting the US this year Ben GroundwaterTravel writer January 21, 2026 — 5:00am January 21, 2026 — 5:00am You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add more. Save this article for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime. There are plenty of reasons to want to avoid travel to the United States right now. Trust me, I have thought through many of them. You might not feel safe in the Land of the Free. You might fear, perhaps as someone who is not white and Anglo-Saxon, or even as someone who doesn’t have an American accent, that you could be targeted by ICE, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, as many people in the US are right now – even those with local citizenship. You might be concerned about being detained at the border and held without charge and without access to communications with family and friends. It’s already happened to Australians. You might have heard about the proposed changes to the US’s ESTA visa-waiver program, and the highly invasive information the country could soon demand in exchange for your entry, and think, nuh-uh. What if I’m denied entry, because I’ve said something critical of Donald Trump in the last decade? That record sticks with you forever. No one wants that. Advertisement And this is on top of the old fears that exist with travel to the US: the rampant, indiscriminate gun violence, the risk of terrorist attacks in a country that likes to throw its weight as the world’s police, the nagging suspicion that the safety warnings from Smart Traveller for this country – green, exercise normal safety precautions – are tainted by the political imperative to be nice about big brother. There’s another reason, too, that you might be considering avoiding travel to the US, and that’s as a form of protest. The world loses when travellers start boycotting countries. There’s very little that we, as regular citizens of the world, can do to voice our disapproval of the current US government (which is unpopular in its home nation, but even more widely disliked abroad). We can’t vote in the US, we can’t take to the US streets with a placard, we can’t manoeuvre quietly in diplomatic circles, we can’t make headlines around the world with our pointed opposition. So what is left? What form of protest is available? You can boycott. You can refuse to visit the US while Donald Trump is president. You can vote with your feet, take one small potshot at the country’s economy and its standing as a respected nation and just refuse to go. Advertisement It’s this last reason that I have a problem with. I understand it, of course. I share the frustration and the sense of powerlessness. I’ve also swung back and forth on the wisdom of travelling to the US right now. First it’s fine, then it’s not, then it might change again. But there’s a guiding factor that I think everyone who travels should consider, and that is that travel boycotts don’t work. Unless those boycotts are part of a co-ordinated protest driven at a governmental level and part of an embargo that is both social and economic, I believe that travel boycotts affect the wrong people, quite often those you are hoping to support. Inbound travel to the US is already down, and who do you think is feeling the brunt of that drop in visitors? It’s not Donald Trump. It’s the people who own tourism businesses, who take tourists hiking and white-water rafting, who put them up in boutique hotels and B&Bs, who run restaurants and cafes in tourist-friendly areas, who hold literally millions of jobs that are affected by tourism. Advertisement Those people are just people, like you and me. They wake up in the morning and try to feed their family and have a good life. They might be part of a struggling minority group. They might have voted for Donald Trump – but they probably didn’t. The world loses when travellers start boycotting countries. Citizens of those countries lose their ability to earn money and support themselves, in a nation where they might already be struggling under a repressive regime. They lose their chance to mix with the outside world, to swap ideas and gain knowledge. We as travellers lose our chance to gain knowledge as well. We force ourselves to see the world through lenses decided by someone else, through algorithms and gatekeepers we have no control over. The narrative is in someone else’s hands. This stance does raise some thorny issues. If you oppose travel boycotts then you have to be consistent. I have to be consistent. I have to say that yes, I will travel to Russia when the war there is over. I will travel to Iran. I will travel to Saudi Arabia. I will travel to China. I will travel to North Korea. Advertisement And I will. Provided I feel safe, I will, and I want to. That last part is an important caveat though, because right now I don’t feel particularly safe travelling to the US, for many of the reasons mentioned above. I’m in the privileged position of being a white guy with a public media profile, but still, I feel like there are many other countries in the world where I will feel more comfortable. But this is not a boycott, and I don’t think it should be for you either. You’re harming the wrong people. You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add more. More: USA Opinion Travel tips Trump's America Ben Groundwater is a Sydney-based travel writer, columnist, broadcaster, author and occasional tour guide with more than 25 years’ experience in media, and a lifetime of experience traversing the globe. He specialises in food and wine – writing about it, as well as consuming it – and at any given moment in time Ben is probably thinking about either ramen in Tokyo, pintxos in San Sebastian, or carbonara in Rome. Follow him on Instagram @bengroundwaterConnect via email.