Falling Foreign Arrivals Set to Squeeze US Rental Bookings
International arrivals to the United States are projected to fall to 67.9 million in 2025, and short-term rental operators in the country's gateway cities are the ones most exposed to the drop. Foreign visitors typically stay longer and spend more per trip than domestic travellers, which means a shortfall in arrivals hits nightly revenue in these markets harder than a simple headcount would suggest.
Why gateway markets feel it first
Cities that built their short-term rental economies on international footfall are not interchangeable with the rest of the country. New York, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Orlando all draw a disproportionate share of overseas bookings, often for stays of a week or longer and at rates well above the domestic average. A property manager running a portfolio in one of these markets is far more sensitive to a dip in inbound travel from Europe, Latin America or Asia than an operator in a Midwest drive-to destination that mostly serves regional weekend traffic. Occupancy in those gateway markets can soften even while national STR demand looks flat on paper, because the guests being lost are the ones who used to fill the higher-value bookings.
What's driving the falloff
The reasons behind the decline are mixed and, for now, largely a matter of industry estimate rather than settled fact. Analysts pointing to the 2025 projection cite a stronger dollar making US trips costlier for overseas visitors, longer visa processing times in several key origin markets, and a run of travel advisories and border friction stories that have made the country a less predictable choice for trip planning. None of these factors is new individually, but their combination is what forecasters say is dragging the total downward rather than any single policy or event.
What operators can do about it now
The practical response is to stop treating the domestic guest as a backup plan and start treating them as the primary market. That means adjusting listing copy and photography for the traveller booking a long weekend rather than a two-week itinerary, revisiting minimum-stay rules that were built around international patterns, and shifting some marketing spend away from channels that skew toward overseas audiences. Operators who rely entirely on OTA traffic have less room to manoeuvre here than those with a direct booking channel they control; a property manager building out a branded site with something like Lodgify's website builder at least has a lever to pull toward domestic search and local advertising rather than waiting on international OTA demand to recover on its own schedule.
None of this points to a collapse in US short-term rental demand. It points to a redistribution: less revenue concentrated in the international-heavy corridors, and more pressure on operators there to prove out a domestic booking base they may not have needed to build before.
