You might have been there: sitting in a café in Lisbon or a temple courtyard in Kyoto when a group of American tourists strolls in. Within a minute, you know exactly where they’re from, what they think of the food, how it stacks up against their favorites back home, and roughly what they paid for their flight. Nobody asked, but the volume tells the story—loud and clear.
Scenes like this play out in cities across Europe, Asia, and beyond, becoming a bit of a stereotype for American travelers. Now, for the first time in a while, the data is catching up with the chatter. American tourist behavior isn’t just a topic for travel blogs anymore; it’s showing up in surveys, booking trends, and that intangible feeling you get when you arrive somewhere with an American passport in 2025 or 2026.
But it’s more complex than just a single café interaction. Some of the friction comes from behavior, some from politics, and some from a clash of cultural norms that makes it clear that no one side is entirely right.
The Numbers Behind the Discomfort
A Global Rescue Snap Survey of more than 1,400 current and former members, conducted in March 2025 following President Trump’s address to Congress, found that the majority of experienced travelers expect US tourists will be less welcome and perceived more negatively while traveling internationally this year due to recent US international policy proposals. Put more plainly: 72% of surveyed travelers believe US tourists will be perceived more negatively abroad in 2025.
What’s striking about that figure is who’s saying it. These are experienced international travelers, not casual observers, and they’re not just predicting a vague mood shift. Some travelers already report experiencing anti-American hostility and political confrontations overseas. This is the kind of thing that tends to make Americans reconsider their plans, or at least what they pack and how they carry themselves.
The broader mood isn’t limited to one survey. According to Ipsos, the proportion of people saying America will have an overall positive influence on world affairs has fallen in 26 out of 29 countries surveyed. Today, roughly 46% on average across those 29 countries say the US will have a positive influence, down from 59% in September and October 2024, before the presidential election. And Gallup’s 2025 World Poll found that China has surpassed the US in global approval ratings, with median approval of US leadership falling from 39% in 2024 to 31% in 2025, while disapproval of US leadership rose to a record-high 48%.
None of that is caused by individual tourists walking through a market too loudly. But it creates the climate those tourists walk into.
What Behaviors Are Actually Annoying People Abroad?
This is where the conversation gets specific, and specificity matters here. American travel behaviors that annoy locals abroad break down into a fairly consistent set of complaints, and they tend to cluster around a few core themes: volume, language expectations, and a kind of cultural impatience.
The loudness complaint comes first because it comes up most often. A 2025 Upgraded Points survey polled 2,200 people in 22 European countries about their views of American tourists. More than 1,000 frequent American travelers were also asked how they thought they were perceived, and both groups were asked what experiences brought them to their conclusions. The findings from that survey were direct: 64% of European respondents say Americans are far too loud, making it the number one behavior hurting US travelers’ reputations overseas. This isn’t a marginal complaint. Almost two in three Europeans put this at the top of the list.
The language issue follows close behind. More than 61% of European respondents believe Americans expect everyone to speak English. That expectation, whether or not it’s consciously held, reads differently in, say, rural Portugal than it might in London. Many Americans travel abroad speaking only English, rarely attempting even basic greetings in the local language. Leading with fast English idioms, speaking louder when not understood, or skipping simple words like “bonjour” or “gracias” comes across as entitled and deeply disrespectful to locals.
Then there’s a complaint that surprises some Americans when they hear it: being too friendly. One-third of European respondents say Americans are overly friendly. This one deserves a little unpacking, because it’s the one that can feel most unjust to Americans who are simply trying to be warm. In many Northern European cultures, warmth with strangers is something that develops slowly, and a big smile and immediate personal questions from someone you’ve known for thirty seconds can feel intrusive rather than welcoming. The behavior isn’t wrong, exactly. It just doesn’t translate.
Rushing through meals is another consistent friction point. Consuming food on the go violates deeply held beliefs about food respect in Japan, Italy, Spain, and France. In Japan, walking while eating is discouraged in many districts and considered quite rude, while Italians view standing espresso as the maximum acceptable “fast” consumption. Americans, raised in a food culture that has normalized eating at a desk or while walking between meetings, often don’t register that sitting down and taking time with a meal is, in many countries, a form of respect for the host.
The Gap Between How Americans See Themselves and How They’re Seen
One of the more revealing details from the Upgraded Points research is that Americans themselves largely know this is happening. A parallel survey of more than 1,000 frequent American travelers found that 73% believe they, as Americans, have a bad reputation abroad, and 54% worry at least a little about their reputation when traveling internationally. That’s not a group operating in blissful ignorance. That’s a group that knows something is off but may not always know what, specifically, to change.
This awareness gap, knowing there’s a problem without knowing precisely what’s driving it, is part of what makes the ugly American stereotype so persistent. The behaviors that draw the most criticism are often ones that feel neutral or even positive from the inside. Being chatty and open is a social skill in the US. Asking questions and expressing enthusiasm is how many Americans show genuine interest. Eating quickly can be a function of a work culture that offers limited lunch breaks rather than any disrespect for food. These aren’t character flaws. They’re cultural defaults that happen to misfire in certain contexts.
That said, the data is the data, and dismissing the friction as pure misunderstanding doesn’t serve anyone well either.
The Political Dimension
It would be incomplete to talk about what do foreigners think of American tourists without acknowledging that individual travelers are, right now, inheriting a perception shaped by geopolitics they had no hand in creating. Some Americans are expressing fear or hesitation about traveling abroad because of perceived backlash in response to policies and actions by the current administration, including widespread tariffs, its treatment of ally nations.
The effect is real enough to show up in booking patterns. Opinion toward the US is lowest in Denmark, where just 20% of Danes express a favorable view of the US, plummeting from 48% in August 2024, according to YouGov. Canada, traditionally one of the most reliably friendly destinations for American travelers, has seen a sharp shift. President Trump’s suggestion that Canada become America’s 51st state sparked widespread anger among Canadians, and after tariffs were imposed on all imports from Canada and Mexico in 2025, anti-Americanism rose further as those tariffs harmed historically strong Canada-US relations, as documented by the Angus Reid Institute.
Travel advisors are fielding this anxiety daily. A 2025 TravelAge West survey of 305 travel advisors found that 82% have clients who have expressed concerns about international travel, and 77% report this concern has increased in the past six months. Nearly three-fourths of advisors (73%) say clients are voicing concerns about how they will be perceived or treated as Americans abroad, and 39% have had clients change their travel plans because of this concern. Most advisors (59%) have had clients opt to travel domestically out of fear of anti-American sentiment abroad.
The traveler who shows up in Copenhagen or Tokyo carrying none of these policy anxieties personally, who just wants to eat good food and see beautiful things, is still perceived through that lens. Travelers don’t control those variables, but they inherit the consequences. Whether it’s tariffs, immigration crackdowns, or diplomatic friction, the average American crossing a border gets read through that lens.
What the US Travelers Criticism Actually Points To
What’s useful about separating the behavioral complaints from the political ones is that it reveals which problems are actually solvable by individual travelers. The geopolitical climate is not. How loud you are in a café is.
Global Rescue experts advise US travelers to avoid displaying overt symbols of American nationality, such as clothing with political slogans or nationalistic imagery, and to stay informed, maintain a low profile, and be culturally aware. These aren’t suggestions to be ashamed of where you’re from. They’re the same common-sense adjustments any thoughtful guest makes: you behave according to the norms of the house you’re in, not the house you came from.
Research suggests that attempting just a few words in the local language, specifically hello, thank you, and excuse me, dramatically increases positive interactions and opens doors that English-only approaches close. The effort matters more than the fluency. Someone stumbling through a “merci” or a “sumimasen” is making a social gesture that’s entirely separate from whether they actually speak the language. Locals notice it, and they respond differently to it.
On the volume question, the adjustment is as simple as it sounds. What feels like normal conversation volume in New York or Texas comes across as shouting in Stockholm or Kyoto, where public spaces are treated like shared living rooms that deserve quiet respect. No one is asking Americans to whisper. The calibration just needs to shift downward.
What This Means for You
The honest takeaway here is that being an American traveler in 2025 and 2026 requires more self-awareness than it used to, for reasons that are partly your doing and partly not. The political climate has changed the baseline temperature in many countries, and that’s not something a well-chosen wardrobe or careful volume control can entirely reverse. But it does make the behavioral piece more important, not less. When the macro-level perception is already under pressure, small courtesies carry more weight.
The most criticized American tourist habits worldwide, specifically loudness, language expectations, and cultural impatience, are also the most fixable. They don’t require you to perform a different nationality or suppress who you are. They require you to read a room. To lower your register in quiet spaces. To try a phrase or two before defaulting to English. To sit with your meal instead of eating it on the way to the next thing. The places you’re visiting aren’t waiting for you to arrive. They’re going about their lives, and you’ve been given a window into that. How you behave inside that window says something, and people are watching.
The good news, buried in all these surveys, is that the same European respondents who flag the loudness and the language expectations also describe Americans as friendly, curious, and fun. A majority of Europeans find Americans to be friendly (64%), about 42% find Americans to be curious, and 32% find them to be fun. The raw material for being a genuinely welcomed guest is already there. It just needs a little cultural calibration to land properly.
A.I. Disclaimer: This article was created with AI assistance and edited by a human for accuracy and clarity.