Tourism in U.S.
Tourists are seen during an anti-Trump demonstration following President Donald Trump's election victory, at Angel Independencia monument, in Mexico City, Mexico, Nov. 12, 2016. Reuters

So what has been the impact of President Donald Trump's campaign rhetoric and his administration's latest controversies on foreign travelers? If we go by a recent study, we will find there has been a decline in the number of foreign travelers visiting the U.S. in the recent months.

Amid the current administration's shakeups and debates over national security, the study found travel to the U.S. declined by 16 percent and there is no sign of recovery. Perhaps, it is an outcome of Trump's travel ban executive order.

Read: How Will Trump's Travel Ban Affect Housing Market?

A research conducted by Foursquare — a local search-and-discovery service mobile app which provides search results for its users — found "America’s 'market share' in international tourism started to decline in Oct. 2016, when the U.S. tourism share fell by six percent year-over-year (YoY), and continued to decrease till March 2017 when it dropped all the way to -16 percent. Currently, there is no sign of recovery in the data."

To conduct this analysis, Foursquare analyzed data gathered from over 50 million mobile users across the world. It studied the kinds of foot traffic associated with leisure travel and with business travel. Foot traffic refers to pedestrian visitors to a business or commercial site.

The study was focused more on stops made at venues such as convention centers, restaurants, museums, stores, etc. by tourists who are visiting from abroad, instead of looking at hotel and airport data.

According to the study, Los Angeles and San Diego are the two cities that have been impacted the most by the drop. Both cities saw strong year-on-year gains in fall 2016, but international tourism has dropped sharply in the first quarter of 2017.

Tourism in the U.S. getting hit by the travel ban is not something new. For instance, the airfare prediction app Hopper, analyzed 303 million flight searches between Jan. 26 and Feb. 1, and found flight search demand from 122 countries to the U.S. dropped by 17 percent after the implementation of the travel ban. The demand for flight search in the first three weeks of January was much higher.

Although, the demand picked up after the ban was temporarily lifted Feb. 3, it was still down by more than 10 percent as of Feb. 10, when compared with the first three weeks in January, said Hopper’s chief data scientist, Patrick Surry.

Other travel companies such as Cheapflights.com, Flygresor.se, ForwardKeys, Responsible Travel, and Intrepid Travel also found flight demand to the U.S. in the following days to the announcement of travel ban declined by multifold, as reported by the New York Times.

While, the travel ban is a factor behind the decline in tourism, the Trump administration's current ban on a broad range of electronic devices in the cabins of U.S.-bound aircraft from certain countries has also made the U.S. not so tourist-friendly, according to NBC News.

The current administration is weighing options to ban electronics to all international flights. John Kelly, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, had recently told reporters the U.S. might expand its electronics ban to Europe or all international flights, according to USA Today.

Read: Trump Electronics Ban Could Be Extended To European, Including UK

In March, the Trump administration imposed restrictions on carry-on electronic devices on planes coming to the U.S. from 10 airports in Muslim-majority nations in the Middle East and North Africa in response to terrorism threats.

"With all that's going on in the world, unilaterally disarming the marketing of the U.S. as a travel destination would be to surrender market share at the worst possible time,” NBC News reported citing U.S. Travel Association President and CEO Roger Dow.

Another poll conducted for the 2017 U.S. News Best Countries Rankings recently found more than 70 percent of survey respondents were negative about the controversial nature of the U.S. presidential election last year. The survey was conducted for more than 21,000 people from 36 countries in the world. Around 60 percent of them said that they would have supported Hillary Clinton if the election had been global, according to U.S. News & World Report.

In the annual “Best Countries” ranking from U.S. News & World Report, the U.S. fell from the fourth last year to seventh this year.