A new Leger study sheds light on how Canadians and Americans travelled this summer, and how tariffs and politics are reshaping cross-border tourism.
The data points to a clear shift in travel behaviours, one that has major implications for tourism operators, government agencies, and cross-border relations.
- Most Canadians stayed close to home: 52% travelled within their own province — far more than had originally planned.
- U.S. travel took a major hit: Only 13% of Canadians visited the U.S. this summer, despite 25% having planned to. Over a quarter (27%) changed their travel plans due to tariffs and the political climate.
- Americans prefer to stay domestic: 89% of U.S. leisure travellers stayed within the U.S., and Canada attracted only 5% of them.
- But there’s room for growth: 35% of Americans say they are open to visiting Canada in the future.
Steve Mossop, Executive Vice-President, Western Canada, Leger, said the survey is the implication of U.S. PresidentTrump and tariff politics on travel and in travel intentions in Canada.
“When Trump first got elected, the approval rating for Trump in Canada has always hovered around 18% up until that point, and then as his policies and as his politics unfolded, that dropped to an all time low of about 9% where it sits currently,” he said.
“So there’s still a small fraction of the population in Canada that support Trump and Trump policies. And then we started getting into some interesting polling results where we found that not only were people significantly concerned, and this is top of the agenda, number one issue in the country as far as what people care and concern about, but we found some interesting polling results that really rocked the foundations of our friendship with the US, and one of them was we asked whether Canadians felt that the US was an ally, a friend or an enemy country, and we found about 35% said that they considered the USA an enemy country, along the same lines as a lot of Canadians would feel that with Russia, Russia was around 50% so it you know that that kind of a context showed that Canadians were serious, and not just in travel, but in nearly every consumer categories, from grocery shopping to even big box retailers and even down to organizations like Netflix and Disney, Disney plus.
“We saw a large percentage of Canadians boycotting American products and services . . . So when we get into the travel part, it’s not surprising that we see the numbers that we saw.”
Mossop said he spoke at a Canadian Tourism Conference in April, and the numbers at that point were not baked into the equation about the impacts. First polls indicated a massive drop off in travel intentions occurring, and that the implications would reverberate through the nation in several ways.
“When you look at destinations like New York and Phoenix and Vegas, and we were seeing numbers from Air Canada, from West Jet, where routes have been dropped. And 40, 50, 70% decreases in travel to those popular destinations. So the impact on Canadian outfits that are servicing travel is the first thing. And the second, of course, is the implications for all of the US destinations that have suffered the consequences of that in some pretty big ways. You look at Maine and the resorts in and around the northeast, you look at even the impacts in Seattle, those are real, and the numbers are being counted in different ways every day,” he explained.
“On the flip side, though, there is an upside that there is a counter effect, where Canadians were traveling much more extensively within their own country. So backyard vacations in province, vacations, the numbers were through the roof. So you look at hotel occupancy rates, you look at hotel rates, you look at travel operators in Canada, they’ve seen this boom that they didn’t expect at the beginning of the year back when I spoke at that initial conference.”
Mossop said Canadians remain steadfast in their avoidance of U.S. travel.
“We have about three in five Canadians who just four weeks ago said that they are less open to traveling to the US in the next six months. And half of those are much less open, and only a small single digit percentage say that they’re actually more open to traveling to the US. So for now, until we see a dramatic change and the rhetoric dissipates, we expect Canadians to remain true to their intentions.
So that’s not just travel, that’s purchases of California wine or Kentucky bourbon or any of the other consumer categories where we’ve been tracking since February, the consumers are staying steadfast in their intention.”
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