The American comeback: is the Aussie love affair with the US back on?

Is the Aussie love affair with the US back on? Or are the statistics just slow to catch up?

New data shows Australian trips to the US are on-the-rise following a drop earlier in 2025, but experts say the full picture is yet to be seen.

Explore already reported seven per cent fewer Australians visited the US in March 2025 compared to the same period the previous year, according to US government statistics.

Fast forward three months, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows travel to the US is growing again - by eight per cent year-on-year in May and 2.5 per cent in June.

But according to experts, this doesn't account for bookings made ahead of time, and fewer people have been locking in US trips since tariffs were introduced and border crackdowns made the news.

According to ABS, the 69,370 US trips Aussies returned from in May and 54,240 in June were well behind 2019's pre-pandemic levels of 94,990 and 86,380, respectively.

Griffith Institute for Tourism professor of practice, Daniel Gschwind, said the growing passenger numbers were "a good thing" overall.

"In a time of global uncertainty, we should welcome and applaud the people-to-people diplomacy - in inverted commas - and maybe that does more for world peace and global harmony than the political diplomacy occasionally does," Mr Gschwind told Explore.

However, travel to other countries, particularly those in Asia, is recovering at a much quicker rate than to the US.

In June, a total of 914,080 short-term trips were recorded overseas, an increase of almost 6 per cent compared with the corresponding month of the previous year. This was 8.6 per cent higher than the pre-COVID level in June 2019.

Indonesia was the most popular destination country, accounting for 16 per cent of all resident returns.

"Japan, Indonesia/Bali, New Zealand, other destinations are growing more rapidly as a preferred choice for Australians," Mr Gschwind said.

"This is going to bring about a significant increase in capacity between Australia and the US towards the back end of 2025, which we generally see driving price wars on fares, and it'll encourage more competition on the route."

He said slower bookings to the US in early 2025 were continuing in the April-June quarter but Flight Centre was anticipating the impact would be "reasonably short-lived".

"For the large majority that are continuing to travel to and from the US, be it for work or holidays, the overwhelming experience has been positive, and we believe the travel volumes will pick back up in the coming few months as confidence fully returns," he said.