While it's still unclear what President-elect Donald Trump means for the U.S. travel industry, data from CheapFlightsFinder.com suggests that Nov. 8's election results may have turned off some Muslim travelers to the U.S.
The flight search engine reported Tuesday that searches for U.S.-bound flights from Arab countries are down a whopping 70 percent compared to October 2016 in the two weeks since the election.
On the flip side, the data shows that the U.K., Turkey, and Malaysia are experiencing spikes in searches from primarily Islamic countries in wake of the election. Although a majority of citizens in Turkey and Malaysia practice Islam, Muslims remain a minority in the U.K.
"We obviously can't speak to each traveler's reasoning for searching flights to a particular country, but we can say for certain what the data is showing, which is that in the last two weeks, the vast majority of Muslim travelers appear to have decided against flying to the United States," said CheapFlightsFinder CEO Shahab Siddiqui in a statement.
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"Is there a correlation to Donald Trump being elected president? The numbers seem to suggest that."
Siddiqui speculates that "the U.S. travel industry could be in for a bit of a depression in the weeks and months to come" given the uncertainty of a Trump administration.
Trump's controversial comments about Muslims on the campaign trail undoubtedly turned many travelers off to the President-elect. Nonetheless, it remains to be seen whether his presence in the White House alone will be enough to deter Muslims from traveling to the U.S.
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