Travel service says fewer Muslims seeking US flights

Trumplash? Muslim Searches for USA Flights Plummet Following U.S. Election, Reports CheapFlightsFinder.com

Muslims are staying away from the U.S. in droves following the election of Donald Trump. In fact, in the fourteen days since the U.S. presidential election, searches for U.S.-bound flights from Arab countries are down by a staggering 70% compared to October’s numbers, reports CheapFlightsFinder, home of the world’s first Meta-Meta Flight Search®.

Where would Muslim travelers now prefer to spend their vacation time? The U.K., Turkey, and Malaysia, all of which are seeing spikes in CheapFlightsFinder.com searches originating from primarily Islamic countries.

“We obviously can’t speak to each traveler’s reasoning for searching flights to a particular country, but we can say for certain what the data is showing, which is that in the last two weeks, the vast majority of Muslim travelers appear to have decided against flying to the United States,” said CheapFlightsFinder CEO Shahab Siddiqui. “Is there a correlation to Donald Trump being elected president? The numbers seem to suggest that.”

Dubai from airplane. Photo courtesy of Ray Hanania

While the majority of Turkish and Malaysian citizens practice Islam, the same cannot be said of the U.K. Could that country’s recent spike in airfare searches originating from Muslim countries be related to the U.S. elections? Perhaps. In January of this year, the Pew Research Center estimated that approximately 1% of the American population was Muslim in 2015, while approximately 4.8% of the U.K.’s population was Muslim that same year. Though Islam is practiced by a pronounced minority of citizens in both countries, CheapFlightsFinder’s data could be interpreted to mean that Muslim travelers now feel safer visiting the U.K. than they do visiting the U.S.

“The U.S. travel industry could be in for a bit of a depression in the weeks and months to come, particularly until the world has a better sense of what America will look like under a Trump administration and whether that might affect travelers visiting from other countries,” Siddiqui speculated. “We plan to keep a close watch on the data here at CheapFlightsFinder and will continue to report on trends as we see them developing.”

About CheapFlightsFinder
Founded in 2008 and recommended by Arthur Frommer, the Daily Mail, and the Times Online, CheapFlightsFinder is a leader in travel savings. The company’s Meta-Meta Flight Search® was the first search engine to compare every leading airfare comparison search engine to give travelers as much as a 20% discount over the lowest fares found elsewhere. Along with helping consumers save money on airfare, CheapFlightsFinder collects and reports on travel-related data to highlight the influence of global political and economic events on world travel trends. Learn more at www.cheapflightsfinder.com.

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Ray Hanania is an award-winning columnist, author & former Chicago City Hall reporter (1977-1992). A veteran who served during the Vietnam War and the recipient of four SPJ Peter Lisagor Awards for column writing, Hanania writes weekly opinion columns on mainstream American & Chicagoland topics for the Southwest News-Herald, Des Plaines Valley News, the Regional News, The Reporter Newspapers, and Suburban Chicagoland.

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