Valarie D'Elia takes a look at how the travel industry is reacting to President Donald Trump's controversial executive order barring immigrants and refugees from seven Muslim-majority countries from the United States.
Patricia Schultz, author of "1,000 Places to See Before You Die," says to her, Iran is "possibly the place to see before you die."
"It's one of those places that needs to be on the very short list to see sooner rather than later," Schultz says. "Because as I stand here and talk, as we've seen, everything is changing and changing radically."
Indeed, on the New York Times Travel Show floor, word was quickly spreading that a federal judge in Brooklyn put a stay on President Trump's earlier executive order banning travelers from Iran and six other Muslim-majority countries, leading Iran to threaten to deny American visas.
"The stay was actually a very important signal to the Iranian government," says Greg Geronemus of SmarTours. "We've gotten initial reports that they might actually reverse their tit-for-tat decisions."
New York City-based SmarTours is one of a handful of exhibitors offering tours to Iran, which has a whopping 21 UNESCO heritage sites.
"We remain optimistic," Geronemus says. "We are going to continue to sell Iran, and we expect to be able to operate our trips in July."
Approximately 7,000 tourists visited Iran in 2016, marking a 40 percent increase from the year before. Some fear Trump's executive order might stymie progress the emerging tourism destination is making.
"We don’t know," says Rene M. Du Terroil of Iran Doostan Tours. "Right now, there's only the statement that President Rouhani made about the possibility of ending visas based on reciprocity for what's going on towards Iranians entering the United States."
Others think that global travel in general might suffer.
"This also puts a sort of cooling effect on other people wanting to travel to the United States, and this could directly impact the travel economy here," says Michael Luongo, a Middle East travel expert.