Top Trumps for Business Travel to the US

Political headlines and strong rhetoric once suggested business travel to the US might decline. In reality, it barely paused. Despite the noise, commercial necessity continued to outweigh perception, with UK and European business travellers flying as normal. This article looks at why business travel to the US remained resilient when leisure travel faltered.

If you’d believed the pundits when Donald Trump’s first presidential term began in 2017, you’d have assumed British business travellers would recoil from the US like it was force-feeding pints of warm bleach at passport control. Walls! Tariffs! MAGA hats! Surely corporate travellers would cancel their flights and retreat to the comforting neutrality of Frankfurt or Zurich instead - sometimes, boring is best.

Except… they didn’t.

From a travel management perspective, this is where the narrative splits apart faster than Donald’s hair in a gale. The data tells a rather inconvenient story: British business travel to the US barely flinched. Leisure travel wobbled, headlines screamed, X combusted, but the people who actually make money for a living kept departing across the pond clutching laptops and an expression that said, “I hate this, but I hate losing market share more.”

Yes, overall UK visits to the US dipped slightly after 2017, but business travel as a proportion of those trips stayed stubbornly consistent. In plain English, there were fewer tourists posing at the Statue of Liberty, but roughly the same number of executives arguing about contracts over hotel coffee that tastes faintly of despair.

The election may have offended dinner-party sensibilities, but it didn’t dent balance sheets. Why? Because trade doesn’t care about feelings.

Trump introduced tariffs that rattled major supply chains - like steel and aluminium - and brought a general sense that globalisation had wandered into the wrong pub. Visa rhetoric became spikier. Border control acquired a reputation for being about as welcoming as a bouncer on commission. And still… British firms kept flying. Because when your biggest export market is the US, you don’t stop visiting just because the leader has started shouting at the furniture.

In fact, if anything, the political turbulence arguably increased the need for face-to-face business travel. In normal times, you can hide behind email. When tariffs change overnight and regulatory language starts sounding like it was written from the football terraces, you get on a plane. Deals don’t renegotiate themselves and Zoom is no substitute for looking someone in the eye and saying, “Let’s be sensible adults about this.”

There’s also the small matter of visas. For all the noise, British travellers have retained visa waiver access (although if your social media is dodgy, the rubber gloves may await). ESTA remains a mildly irritating online hoop rather than a full bureaucratic obstacle course. The drawbridge hasn’t yet gone up. Which means that while the rhetoric sounds like a Cold War remake, the mechanics of travel stay largely intact.

From the coalface of travel management, the change has been tonal, not behavioural. More pre-trip briefings. More questions from nervous travellers. More contingency planning. But cancellations? Hardly. The US remains too big, too rich and too commercially irresistible to ignore. New York didn’t suddenly stop being New York just because the Oval Office acquired a fondness for shouty capital letters.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth that makes this whole thing deliciously controversial: business travellers, unlike X pilots, have an actual function in life. And their verdict is clear. Trump may have shaken up politics, diplomacy and polite conversation but – so far - he has barely scratched the fundamental appetite for UK-US trade.

So the lasting image isn’t of empty departure lounges and tumble weed at boarding gates. It’s of British executives flying to America like moths to a flame; grumbling, opinionated, occasionally outraged, but doing a job they have to do, whether they like it or not.

We board the plane, put on our headphones and keep quiet. A few days later, job done, we return. Only then do we let rip about the difference between what we witness compared to the propaganda we’re fed. So buckle up, it’s going to be this way for at least the next two years.