Planning a trip to the US? Don’t mention the Donald

There are those who misguidedly believe that not only should sport and politics never mix, travel and politics shouldn’t ever coexist either.

Fat chance. As the world has witnessed with international sport over the decades, the notion that it and world events can be separated has proved historically risible, and now we witness overseas travel becoming markedly more politicised.

US President Donald Trump, like Basil Fawlty, is a hotelier with thinly disguised hostility towards his guests.Credit: Aresna Villanueva

Nowhere is it more starkly illustrated than what appears to be the weaponisation of tourism for political purposes by the Trump administration and its facilitators, who appear to be Googling overtime in search of any criticism of the president and his policies.

This article, and others I’ve written critical of US treatment of tourists under the Trump administration in my role as travel editor of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, will likely render any visit by me to the United States a risky proposition.

I’m not complaining. For me, it’s no loss. It’s still a wide, wonderful and mostly welcoming world out there, and word has it that our far more rational Canadian friends could do with a little Antipodean love in the form of a holiday there.

So forget about yours truly, and consider the recent case of a reader of the Traveller title of the above publications.

Only a few hours before the departure of his flight earlier this month to visit his daughter in the US, Australian Bruce Hyland received notice from American immigration authorities that he would not be permitted to enter the country. This news came after having been approved to visit.

“No reason for a cancellation was provided [for the decision to refuse entry],” Hyland writes in his Traveller letter, “so one is in the Kafkaesque situation of having breached some official procedure, while having no way to appeal the decision or determine what that procedure could be.”

In reality, he suspects the last-minute edict relates to what may have been perceived by US officials as anti-Donald Trump sentiment that he has expressed, perhaps including this admittedly spirited letter he penned that was published in the SMH earlier this year.

In the more recent Traveller missive, Hyland declares it “unthinkable” that in the US, “the land of much-vaunted freedom of speech”, he should be penalised, as he suspects, “for posting online several comments critical of President Trump and his administration”.

“It remains difficult to think of any reason why it should be acceptable for me to visit the US in May and then suddenly it be unacceptable in July. Once upon a time, we only worried about such matters when travelling behind the Iron Curtain.”

Of course, many Australians pass through US border control entirely without incident, wondering what all the fuss is about. But too many Australians are falling foul of US immigration to not arouse at least a modicum of concern, if not alarm.

If it weren’t all so suspiciously sinister, one could be tempted to risibly portray Trump as America’s answer to Basil Fawlty, that unhinged innkeeper from the classic mid-’70s British sitcom, Fawlty Towers.

John Cleese as Basil Fawlty, the innkeeper of Fawlty Towers.Credit: BBC

A hotelier effectively himself, with a number of properties owned under his Trump Hotels brand – spread across the US, Scotland and Ireland with more in the works for Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Vietnam and Romania – Trump has not only inexplicably removed the figurative welcome mat for visitors to the US, he’s summarily torched it.

While Basil Fawlty declared “don’t mention the war” in relation to his hapless house guests, for a growing number of travellers from around the world, Australia included, it’s case of “don’t mention the Donald” in an unflattering or activist light on any electronic platform that can be traced by sleuth-like US immigration authorities.

Trump’s reckless rhetoric towards the sovereignty of neighbouring Canada – which he’s derided as being a candidate for the 51st state of the US – has so offended Canadians en masse that they mounted an unprecedented consumer boycott of once-lucrative cross-border travel.

In June, the number of Canadians taking road trips to the US declined by a whopping 33 per cent compared with the previous year. There was a 22 per cent drop in travel by air from Canada to the US in a similar period.

Visitor numbers from a so much less outraged Australian outbound tourism market actually increased in June, year on year, after falling in the previous two months.

But Brand USA, the nearest equivalent to our federal government-funded Tourism Australia, is sufficiently concerned about the Australian market that it’s undertaking a trade delegation Down Under next month.

The Brand USA mission comes soon after it suffered an enormous federal funding cut by the Trump administration.

While Australian tourists to the US don’t always figure in the list of top visitor nations to the States, they are valued in many markets there in respect to their length of stay and resultant high expenditure.

Now, in another blow to the once-mighty US tourism markets, visitors to the country could soon face a new $US250 ($380) “visa integrity fee”, an impost designed in part to deter overstayers, that may rule out an already expensive destination for many travellers.

So far, those visiting from the more than three dozen nations, including Australia, that are part of the US Visa Waiver Program will likely be exempt from the new fee. But based on the erratic policies of the Trump administration, who knows what could eventuate?

With next year’s coveted FIFA World Cup of football to be jointly, and ironically, hosted by the US and its erstwhile friends, Canada and Mexico, Basil Trump risks conceding another massive tourism own goal with an event that overwhelmingly surpasses the Olympics in terms of visitor numbers and the revenue it generates.

Anthony Dennis is editor of the Traveller title in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.