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The Ottawa International Airport Authority said its decline in passengers flying to the United States was driven by a drop in the back half of last year.
According to the airport authority’s annual report, which was discussed at a public meeting Wednesday, the number of passengers travelling to the U.S. went up in the first part of 2025 by seven per cent.
The second half of the year saw a decrease of 12 per cent.
“At the beginning of last year, we didn’t see as much of an impact as some of the other airports across Canada, things held fairly steady,” said Susan Margles, the airport authority’s president and CEO.
“But by the end of the year, we did see the impact of people not wanting to travel to the U.S.”
The report said U.S. travel for the entire year went down from around 741,000 in 2024 to around 726,000 in 2025. Each are above the 686,000 seen in 2019.
The number of passengers going to or coming from the States is down year-over-year in each of the first three months of 2026, bringing about 17,000 or seven per cent fewer of those travellers as of the end of March.
As for why she thinks fewer people are traveling south of the boarder, Margles attributed it to “a lot of uncertainty in the world.”
“So much of our travel is leisure-based travel and I think people are being very careful with where they’re spending their money,” she said.
Susan Margles, the airport authority’s president and CEO, standing at the Cohere Centre, where she discussed the airport’s 2025 annual report. (Nathan Fung/CBC)
Sueling Ching, president and CEO of the Ottawa Board of Trade, attended Wednesday’s meeting. She said it’s not surprising to hear there’s a drop in travel to the U.S.
“I think what we’ve had to do is be really adaptable as as a community and as a country to the things that are happening in the U.S. There’s a lot of uncertainty,” she said.
Other airport authorities have reported similar declines in U.S. travel. Vancouver’s 2025 annual report states that travel to the U.S. went down by 7.1 per cent, dropping to 6.2 million.
Calgary’s annual report states it saw a 3.4 per cent drop to 3.7 million transborder passengers.
Nationally, more Canadians have returned to the country on flights from overseas this year than from driving from the States as of the end of this past March, according to Statistics Canada.
Canadian land travel to the U.S. also significantly dropped in 2025.
Getting closer still to pre-pandemic levels
Overall Ottawa passenger numbers were positive, Margles said, with around 4.9 million passengers having travelled through the airport last year.
That number represents a six-per-cent increase compared to 2024, which saw 4.6 million passengers go through the airport.
Prior to 2020, the airport saw nearly five million travelers annually. But passenger volumes dropped to just over one million in 2020 and 2021, devastating the airport’s revenues.
And while U.S. travel is trending downwards, the report said domestic passengers went up by six per cent and international traffic went up by 12 per cent.
Margles attributed the increase to the international routes that were added last year, with one being the reinstatement of non-stop service to London by Air Canada in March 2025.
“The good news is that the airlines who operate in Ottawa have really rejigged capacity and opened up other destinations to make up for the U.S. destinations that they’re either not flying to or flying to less frequently,” she said.