Editorial: Pound (and Euro and Canadian Dollar) Foolish
By • January 13, 2026 0 7
Good news for Georgetowners who dislike sharing the neighborhood’s streets, parks, historic sites, shops and restaurants with foreign tourists: there are going to be fewer of them.
Of course, it’s bad news for the historic sites, shops and restaurants — and even worse for our hotels.
International tourism is, oddly enough, an export. While they’re here, visitors from the U.K., the eurozone and Canada are spending pounds, euros and Canadian dollars.
Destination DC has yet to share its 2025 numbers, but the District’s 27.2 million visitors in 2024, a five-percent increase over 2023, were said to support 111,500 local jobs and generate $2.3 billion in tax revenue.
Of those 27.2 million, 2.2 million were from beyond our borders. Just eight percent of the bodies (actually arrivals), they were responsible for fully a quarter of the $11.4 billion in visitor spending.
As of 2023, Washington, D.C., was seventh on the list of the most popular U.S. destinations for international visitors, behind New York, Miami, Los Angeles, Orlando, San Francisco and Las Vegas. Thanks to our monuments, the cherry blossoms, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery and other museums — and, yes, Georgetown’s fame as a historic, beautiful, cosmopolitan neighborhood — we get about five percent of the total (New York gets nearly 30 percent).
Businesses in D.C. and Georgetown are already feeling the impact of the DOGE-triggered flood of federal retirements, resignations and layoffs, plus the decline in the international student population. This would have been a good time for international tourism to take up some of the slack.
Canada was D.C.’s top international market in 2024, sending us 258,000 visitors, about 12 percent of the total. You know about that problem already. The president thinks Canada, not D.C., should be the 51st state.
The next nine sources of international visitors to D.C. in 2024 were the U.K., India, Germany, China, France, South Korea, Mexico, Italy and Spain.
Five of them — the U.K., Germany, France, Italy and Spain — are among the 42 countries covered by the Electronic System for Travel Authorization. The ESTA eliminates the need for a visa to enter the U.S. as a tourist.
On Dec. 9, U.S. Customs and Border Protection proposed changes to the ESTA that would require prospective visitors to submit their social media history for the past five years, along with detailed personal, family and biometric data. If approved (travel industry stakeholders can submit comments up to Feb. 9), this will have what is usually referred to as “a chilling effect.”
On April 14 and 15, D.C. will host Destination Capitol Hill, a travel industry event at which participants will “advocate for policies that ensure America is prepared to seamlessly welcome millions of visitors during a historic decade of events.” One of the first of those events: America250, for which Washington will be the place to be (along with Philadelphia and Boston).
We doubt that our formerly good friends, the Brits and the Canadians, will feel much like celebrating.
