WASHINGTON — The day before the June 28 terrorist attacks on Istanbul’s international airport, the State Department had updated and reissued its warning to U.S. citizens traveling in Turkey to stay away from crowds at tourist destinations and to “remain vigilant” in public places such as transportation hubs.
Within minutes after the explosions, the department advised Americans, via Twitter, to avoid the airport. Over the next 24 hours, nearly two dozen messages reminded travelers to call loved ones and advised how to begin rebooking flights home.
It has been a busy year for the department’s Consular Information Program. Since the end of May, advisories have included warnings about travel to Venezuela, Kenya, Haiti and Bangladesh.
U.S. citizens were also alerted to “the risk of potential terrorist attacks throughout Europe, targeting major events, tourist sites, restaurants, commercial centers and transportation.” As it does every six months, the State Department advised against any travel to Iraq.
Americans and their government are not the only ones unnerved by the chaos sweeping many parts of the world. Some countries are equally worried about their own citizens traveling here.
After a United Arab Emirates tourist, wearing a traditional robe and speaking on a cellphone in Arabic, was detailed at gunpoint by police in Ohio over the Fourth of July weekend, that government cautioned travelers to “refrain from wearing the national dress” in public places while traveling in the West.
On Friday, Bahama’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said it had “taken a note of the recent tensions in some American cities over shootings of young black males by police officers.” It advised all Bahamians to “exercise appropriate caution,” and asked “young males” from the predominately black country to “exercise extreme caution … in their interactions with the police. Do not be confrontational and cooperate.”
Over the weekend, as demonstrations swept U.S. cities, Bahrain’s U.S. embassy, via Twitter, advised its nationals here to “be cautious of protests or crowded areas occurring around the U.S.” The UAE embassy issued a similar message urging “UAE nationals, who are in the U.S., to stay away from places of protests and demonstrations,” the UAE news agency.
U.S. statistics on American travelers overseas, and foreigners visiting here, tend to lag, and it is not yet clear whether the annual number of travelers venturing to other countries — up by 4.4 percent in 2015, for the sixth consecutive year of growth, according to the United Nations — will fall in 2016. Americans venturing abroad made an estimated 90 million annual trips in previous years.
Fluctuating exchange rates and low oil prices have benefited international travel, the U.N. said in a January report. But, it said, “as the current environment highlights in a particular manner the issues of safety and security, we should recall that tourism development greatly depends upon our collective capacity to promote safe, secure and seamless travel.”
International visitors to this country increased by 3 percent to a record 77.5 million in 2015, according to the Commerce Department, after deep dips immediately following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the 2008 global economic downturn.
