This article empirically examines the postulated effects of at least a single terrorist attack on the measure of monthly international arrivals. The study uses the tsoutliers R package to detect outliers in time series data following terrorist attacks in five destinations. The contribution of this paper is found in the methodological approach that was implemented consistently across all five destinations. The findings suggest that there is no evidence to support the view that there is a consistent disturbance from a well‐fitted time series (a data ‘fingerprint’) created by a terrorist attack across the five different destinations or even, in at least one case, in the same destination, at different times. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.