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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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rayhanania

Op-Ed writer, author, radio host, podcaster at The Arab Daily News

RAY HANANIA — Op-Ed writer, author, radio host, podcaster

Ray Hanania is an award winning political and humor columnist who analyzes American and Middle East politics, and life in general. He is an author of several books.

Hanania covered Chicago Politics and Chicago City Hall from 1976 through 1992 at the Daily Southtown and the Chicago Sun-Times. He began writing in 1975 publishing The Middle Eastern Voice newspaper in Chicago (1975-1977). He later published “The National Arab American Times” newspaper (2004-2007).

Hanania writes weekly columns on Middle East and American Arab issues as Special US Correspondent for the Arab News ArabNews.com, at TheArabDailyNews.com, and at SuburbanChicagoland.com. He has published weekly columns in the Jerusalem Post newspaper, YNetNews.com, Newsday, the Orlando Sentinel, Houston Chronical, and Arlington Heights Daily Herald.

Hanania is the recipient of four (4) Chicago Headline Club “Peter Lisagor Awards” for Column writing. In November 2006, he was named “Best Ethnic American Columnist” by the New American Media. In 2009, Hanania received the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Award for Writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He is the recipient of the MT Mehdi Courage in Journalism Award. He was honored for his writing skills with two (2) Chicago Stick-o-Type awards from the Chicago Newspaper Guild. In 1990, Hanania was nominated by the Chicago Sun-Times editors for a Pulitzer Prize for his four-part series on the Palestinian Intifada.

His writings have also been honored by two national Awards from ADC for his writing, and from the National Arab American Journalists Association.

Hanania is the US Special Correspondent for the Arab News Newspaper, covering Middle East and Arab American issues. He writes for the Southwest News newspaper group writing on mainstream American issues.

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