The National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO) has published its first-ever report on one of the United States’ major source markets: Mexican travelers.
The data, sourced from 2024, analyzes the trend of overnight land visitors from Mexico to the United States, highlighting their economic importance to the U.S. travel industry.
The United States welcomed 13.4 million Mexicans by land crossings last year, with the vast majority of them (6.2 million) visiting California.
Many border states in the U.S. remain the most popular for land travelers from Mexico, who are able to easily drive to the destinations. These include California, Texas and Arizona. Driving remains the top method of transport while in the U.S., at 72.6 percent, though over a quarter of Mexican visitors do travel between cities by air.
These destinations also remained popular among travelers from Mexico who visited by air, although Nevada, Illinois, Florida and New York were more popular for air travelers than Arizona. California and Texas remained popular air travel destinations.
Just over fifty percent of travel from Mexico began in six of Mexico’s 31 states, five of which are the border states of Baja California, Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila and Nuevo Leon, most likely due to ease of access, being border states.
These travelers spent an average of $986 per person while in the United States, while air travelers from Mexico spent an average of $1,379. The average annual household income for land travelers was US$46,976, above the national average in Mexico.
Land travelers spent an average of 5.3 nights in the United States and slept a combined 71.5 million nights in the United States in 2024.
The main reason for visiting the U.S. is overwhelmingly to take a vacation, at 73.6 percent. Visiting friends or relatives was second, at 21.3 percent. The top leisure activities these travelers engaged in were shopping (at 37 percent), sightseeing (at 31 percent) and visiting National Parks or monuments (at 26 percent).
Current Trends in U.S. Travel
Every 40 international travelers who visit the United States support one American job—that’s how critical international travel is to the nation.
Mexico is currently the nation’s largest source market, meaning that more travelers visit the U.S. from this one country than any other country in the world.
While international inbound travel has dropped 2.4 percent overall year over year (according to data published in May), with 16.8 percent less Canadian travelers and 0.8 percent less overseas visitors, visitation by Mexicans is actually increasing 13.9 percent year over year, which means over 7 million Mexicans visited the country by the time the data was released.
While this doesn’t make up for the overall drop in visitors from other countries, it does mean that destinations in places like California and Texas will be hit less hard than destinations that rely on other source markets, like Canadians, some of whom are choosing to visit Mexico instead of the United States this year.
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