I’ve Taken 50+ Cruises. I’ve Never Been Nervous About Traveling Abroad. Until Now.

I have more than 50 cruises under my belt. I’ve figured out train systems in countries where I don’t speak the language, navigated airports at 4 a.m. on three hours of sleep, and talked my way through border crossings that should have been more complicated than they were. Travel doesn’t scare me. It’s the thing I know best.

So it’s a little strange to admit that I’m nervous about my river cruise through Germany this June.

Not nervous about the ship, or the itinerary, or whether I packed the right shoes. Nervous about walking off a gangway in a German town and having someone clock my accent and decide I owe them an explanation for things I didn’t vote for. That’s a new feeling for me, and I don’t totally know what to do with it.

I’m Not the Only One Thinking About This

A Global Rescue survey of more than 1,400 travelers conducted earlier in 2025 found that 72 percent expected Americans to be perceived more negatively abroad this year, directly linking that fear to current U.S. policy and the geopolitical noise coming out of Washington. That number doesn’t shock me. What got my attention were the firsthand accounts buried in the data. A California traveler said they had already experienced “much more negativity” than on previous trips. A Wyoming traveler described getting into “numerous arguments about American policy” with strangers who just wanted to talk politics the second they heard the accent.

TravelAge West ran a survey of more than 300 travel advisors around the same time and found that 82 percent had clients expressing concerns about international travel, with 73 percent specifically worried about how they’d be treated as Americans abroad. One travel agency reported that 60 percent of their clients initially paused international planning entirely, just sitting on the sideline waiting to see how the world felt about us.
That’s a significant shift.

What My Fellow Travel Creators Are Saying

I reached out to a few colleagues who spend serious time on the road, and the responses landed all over the map, which honestly felt right.

Mikkel Woodruff of SometimesSailing.com isn’t losing sleep over perception. “I’m not concerned with being perceived a certain way as an American traveling abroad,” she told me. “When I travel to another continent, the people we encounter know that my husband and I are not our administration. We are polite and gracious guests and travelers, and we are confident that says more about Americans on a significant personal level than an administration can, an administration that will change when the governmental term is over.” Her concern, she said, runs more practical: flight disruptions, airport delays, and safety on flight paths near active conflict zones. It’s a grounded take, and I get it.

Mike Siegel, comedian and host of the Travel Tales Podcast, which I had the pleasure of joining for the second time recently [listen here], is feeling the weight of it differently. “It’s hard to respond when my friends in other countries ask me what the hell is going on in the U.S. and I can only muster a despondent, ‘Sorry,'” he said. “The last thing I want to do is talk politics when traveling, but it’s becoming harder to avoid. People are genuinely concerned about their own security, jobs, and the world order being upended.” Mike told me that increased fuel prices and longer security lines have already hit him personally, and peak summer travel hasn’t even arrived yet. He’s been buying more refundable tickets, renewing his travel insurance, and rethinking tight layovers because he no longer trusts that flights will hold. On the cultural side, he put it simply: “I’ve always tried to be a good ambassador of the U.S. when I traveled abroad, keeping my voice down, respecting other cultures, learning a bit of the language, and will continue to do so, probably to a higher degree. And if none of that works to cool the animosity, I’ll revert to my other backup plan: I’ll just say I’m Canadian.”

That last line made me laugh.

Then I heard from my friend Mike M., who isn’t a travel industry person but someone currently on the ground in Amsterdam, which felt even more useful. His read was different from what I expected. “No one has really said anything when they find out we’re from the states,” he told me. “We’ve been in a few group event situations where other Americans say where they’re from, and there’s been no commentary either, other than the weather in Michigan.” But what struck me most was how he described the general vibe: “I think people know how bad things are, and it’s kind of an unspoken acknowledgment that we know things are f***ed, they do too, and we’re just trying to find some normal.” His one concrete piece of advice? Ditch the identifiable American clothing. He’s been seeing a lot of University of Michigan and Michigan State gear around and calls it a risk. “We consciously choose to avoid any identifiable clothing when we travel,” he said. “Better to just blend in, especially now.”

That tracks with what security experts have been saying too.

What’s Actually Happening on the Ground

The incidents that have been reported are not dramatic, but they’re real. In February 2025, an American tourist in Copenhagen said she was told to go home after locals heard her accent in a bar. A U.S. student was reportedly heckled near a tariff protest in Berlin the following month. Dragonfly Intelligence, a security risk firm, assessed in April 2025 that isolated verbal harassment of Americans is “reasonably likely” in Europe this year, particularly near protests and busy public spaces.

Germany, where I’m headed, is sitting at the center of a lot of this tension. A 2025 Pew survey put German favorability toward the United States at 33 percent, with 66 percent holding a negative view. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has talked openly about a “deep rift” between Europe and the U.S. The State Department has Germany at a Level 2 travel advisory and specifically flags political demonstrations as unpredictable.

I want to be clear: this is not a safety crisis. Security analysts consistently say that organized violence against individual American tourists remains unlikely. River cruise passengers moving through small towns on a structured itinerary are not the highest-risk travelers in Europe right now. I know that. But I’m also not pretending the world feels the same as it did on my last Germany trip.

What Other Travelers Are Doing

Cameron Hewitt, writing for the Rick Steves blog, logged roughly 100 days across Europe in 2025 and said he never once felt treated differently because of U.S. politics. But he also didn’t sugarcoat the fact that American tariff policy has hurt many of the small European producers and artisans that river cruise travelers meet in these exact towns along the Rhine and Moselle. The frustration in Europe is real. It’s just not always aimed at individual travelers.

Some Americans traveling abroad have found that being upfront works better than trying to be invisible. One traveler told CNN that saying something like “yeah, not our finest hour” when politics came up with Europeans immediately shifted the energy, and once people sensed she wasn’t aligned with the current administration, they were as warm as ever. I don’t know yet which approach I’ll take. Probably somewhere in between.

What I’m Actually Going to Do

I’m still going. That was never really in question.

But I’m thinking about this trip differently than I have any of the others. I’ll be more deliberate about knowing what’s happening locally before I wander. I’ll skip the American flag hat I never wear anyway. I’ll listen more before I talk. And if someone wants a real conversation about what’s happening in the U.S., I’m not going to pretend I don’t have opinions.

Mikkel’s right that we are not our administration. Mike’s right that the questions are getting harder to dodge. Both things are true at the same time, which is kind of where we all are right now.

Fifty sailings tells me that the people you meet in small port towns, at the breakfast tables of river ships, along the banks of the Rhine, are almost always more interested in connection than confrontation. I’m counting on that being true in June.

The river doesn’t care who’s in the White House. I just have to get there and find out what the people think. Stay tuned for my follow-up article to know just how the trip went from my POV.