How Your Travel Costs Could Change Under a Donald Trump Presidency
According to an International Monetary Fund report from 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic put 100 million jobs at risk in the worldwide travel sector, which represents a full 10% of global GDP. America — with its empty skies and ghost highways — was no exception.
Like nearly every country on earth, the U.S. travel sector — and the prices consumers paid for gas, air travel, accommodations, and related services — experienced unprecedented volatility.
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But how might travel costs change if Trump wins in November, presuming a second pandemic doesn’t follow him back to the White House?
“Under a Donald Trump presidency, we could see more radical shifts in the travel industry,” said Nick Burgess, editor-in-chief of the travel site Trip Trend Setters and the former owner of the finance and politics site Making A Millennial Millionaire.
Here’s how your travel costs might change if Trump earns a second term in office.
Tariffs Impact Everything That Travels — Including People
In Trump’s first term in office, tariffs — taxes on imports that foreign sellers pass on to domestic consumers — were the centerpiece of his “America First” trade platform. He targeted specific products like steel and aluminum, but China took the biggest hit with new tariffs as high as 25%.
The result was a protracted trade war that the Tax Foundation said cost American consumers $80 billion.
Trump promised that if re-elected, he’ll expand his policy to include a 10% universal tax on all foreign imports and tariffs as high as 65% on Chinese goods. That has some travel industry veterans worried.
“Trump’s key economic policy is to levy major tariffs against key trade partners to the United States,” said Burgess. “This is a similar, albeit beefed-up, approach to what he did in his first term, which saw real purchasing power shrink among the American middle class. However, the travel industry was hit particularly hard by rising costs due to tariffs from 2017 to 2019, including the costs of furnishing the rooms.”
Burgess cited reporting from Hotel Business magazine to outline how taxes on imports impact travelers, from the aluminum used in airplane construction to complimentary coffee in hotel rooms.
“Tariffs from Chinese-made products — like refrigerators, mattresses, TVs, and microwaves — skyrocketed hotel costs, which were then passed onto the consumer,” he said. “With Trump enhancing the rhetoric for a possible second term and threatening new tariffs for Chinese-made goods, it’s possible that consumers could feel an incredible price squeeze across the travel industry.”
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Cash Refunds for Delays and Cancellations
Just as tariffs are the centerpiece of Trump’s trade policy, deregulation is at the heart of his domestic economic agenda — and consumer-friendly Biden-era travel regulations would likely find themselves in the crosshairs of a second Trump administration.
In April, the Biden-Harris Department of Transportation (DOT) announced new rules, which are set to take effect just before the election, that require airlines to issue refunds as cash or the original form of payment — not travel credits or vouchers, as in the past — to compensate travelers for flight cancellations, extended delays or delayed baggage.
The rules adhere to uniform DOT rules. Previously, airlines set their own policies about which cancellations and delays were worthy of refunds, how much would be refunded and what form the customer compensation would take.
Junk Fees and Fee Disclosures
The Biden regulations would also eliminate so-called “junk fees” that force groups of travelers to pay hundreds of dollars extra to secure seats together, including families and parents with young children.
The new rules also require enhanced disclosure policies that cement transparency and eliminate hidden fees that customers might not understand or even know about.
The airline industry fought hard against these and other Biden-Harris travel regulations, calling them excessive and unduly expensive. It’s unclear what Trump would do in his second term, but during his first administration, he sided with the airlines.
For Many Travelers, De-Regulation Could Mean the Loss of Financial Protections
It’s difficult to imagine a scenario where Biden-era consumer protections survive a second Trump term.
In 2020, John Breyault of the National Consumers League told NPR that the anti-regulation Trump DOT “decided to offer a last-minute gift to the airlines in the dying days of the Trump administration.”
The outlet said Trump’s outgoing rule “redefines unfair and deceptive practices more favorably for the airlines, sets up roadblocks to pursuing complaints and it makes it more difficult to enact future consumer protections” while making “airline passengers more vulnerable to unreasonable flight delays and misleading information about fares and fees with little recourse.”
As for junk fees and fee transparency, Project 2025 — a wish list of conservative policy proposals that Trump has distanced himself from but that many of his advisors helped craft — called out “burdensome disclosure mandates” regarding transportation. It stated that, “The Trump Administration reformed the process for issuing such ‘unfair and deceptive practices’ rules, but the Biden Administration promptly reversed those reforms. A new Administration should restore them.”
Joanna Teljeur, editor and senior writer for AirAdvisor, a passenger consumer advocacy and flight compensation recovery organization in Europe, where similar regulations have protected travelers for decades, put it more plainly.
“If Trump is elected, these rules would never pass,” she said. “And the new airline rules for refunds would also be trashed.”
Editor’s note on election coverage: GOBankingRates is nonpartisan and strives to cover all aspects of the economy objectively and present balanced reports on politically focused finance stories. For more coverage on this topic, please check out How Your Travel Costs Could Change Under a Kamala Harris Presidency.
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