In 1990, roughly 4% of Americans held a passport. Think about that number for a minute. Just 36 years ago, for most Americans, international travel was a distant dream, not something you actually did.
Today, about half of Americans hold one. The State Department reports more than 183 million passports in circulation, and last year it issued more than any year on record. That’s a transformation, and it happened in one generation. But here’s the part that surprised me: more of us can go anywhere than ever before, and almost all of us go to the same dozen places.
Some of it happened fast: after 9/11, new rules meant Americans couldn’t fly to Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean on a driver’s license, and applications jumped more than 50% in a year. But that’s the spike, not the climb — the climb is millions of people deciding the world was for them too, mostly figuring it out themselves, a few weeks before the trip.
And we know who’s doing the planning: Skift Research puts women behind 82% of all travel decisions. (No surprise, there!)
So where do millions of first-time international travelers go? Where everyone else goes.
McKinsey found that 80% of travelers visit just 10% of the world’s destinations.
Per UN Tourism, the ten most-visited countries are France, Spain, the United States, Italy, Turkey, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Greece — absorbing roughly 40% of the planet’s 1.45 billion trips last year. Seven of the ten are in Europe. Which tracks: of course Paris, Rome, London, and Barcelona show up on every list (some of my favorite cities!). See chart below:
It makes sense once you factor in time. The average American gets two to three weeks of paid vacation, and there’s no federal law guaranteeing even that — France and Austria mandate up to six weeks by statute. When you get one shot a year, you pick the crowd favorite: Cabo, London, Paris.
In 2024, American outbound travel hit a record: 107.7 million trips abroad, up 9.2% from the year before, per the National Travel and Tourism Office. Mexico took the biggest single share — 39.9 million trips to Cancún, Mexico City, and Cabo.
Past North America, the overseas list read like a greatest-hits tour: the United Kingdom (London, Edinburgh), Italy (Rome, Venice, Florence), France (Paris, Provence, Bordeaux, Cannes), the Dominican Republic (Punta Cana’s all-inclusive resorts), and Spain (Barcelona, Madrid, Seville). Those five alone pulled in more than 21 million American visitors that year — wow!
2025 kept the streak going, with outbound travel up in almost every month compared with 2024. And the destinations barely budged: through Q3, the top five were the UK, Italy, France, Spain, and Germany. Swap Germany for the Dominican Republic, and you’ve got 2024’s list again. I’d expect 2026’s list to look pretty similar.
But one shift worth watching: as summer heat waves make parts of Europe increasingly brutal in June, July, and August due to global warming, more Americans may start looking north. Scandinavia — Denmark, Sweden, Norway — offers long summer days, cooler temperatures, and none of the overcrowding that’s starting to plague Southern Europe (think Spain, Italy, Greece, and France). I also think there will be a surge in travel to Scotland and Ireland, especially since there is no language barrier for Americans and the summertime weather is very mild. For travelers willing to flip the calendar entirely, the Southern Hemisphere has some fantastic options: Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil are all in their cooler, winter months.
Now flip the passport around. The U.S. is one of the ten most-visited countries on earth, third on the UN Tourism list, right behind France and Spain. The rest of the world clusters into us the same way we cluster into Europe.
68.3 million international visitors came to the U.S. in 2025, down 5.5% from the year before, the first dip since 2020.
Of those international travelers who arrived in the U.S. by air, here’s where they all went:
Florida (9.3 million)
New York (9.1 million)
California (6.6 million)
Nevada
Texas
And the top U.S. cities for international travelers, quarter after quarter?
Orlando (hello, Disney World!)
New York City
Los Angeles
Las Vegas
The United Kingdom sends the most overseas visitors to the U.S., followed by India, Japan, Brazil, and Germany.
Americans keep landing on the same handful of places because they work. Your neighbors went. Your friends came back raving. So you go, and you discover for yourself how fabulous those destinations are. But once those first passport stamps aren't so precious and you've built the confidence to navigate a foreign country, something shifts. Your next trip doesn't have to look like everyone else's.
That’s the whole idea behind The Gomes Guide. Not skip top destinations like Paris (definitely go to Paris!). Just don’t stop there.
Sources: U.S. State Department; National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO), U.S. Department of Commerce; UN Tourism; McKinsey & Company; Skift Research.
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