Moneris<\/a>, more than a quarter of Canadians changed their travel plans to avoid crossing the border, and instead explored provinces here in Canada.<\/p>\nCanadians crossing the border also showed a steep decline for a seventh month in a row, by both air and car.<\/p>\n
A new Angus Reid travel survey commissioned by Moneris found that 26 per cent of Canadians changed, postponed or cancelled their travel plans to the U.S. <\/p>\n
This was great news for Canadian hotels, restaurants, and other businesses.<\/p>\n
\u201cDomestic tourism as a spending vehicle to drive the economy is enormous,\u201d said Sean McCormick, director of Business Development of Data Services at Moneris.<\/p>\n
The survey also found that 30 per cent of Canadians decided to travel to other provinces, while 44 per cent of Canadians chose to travel within their own province. <\/p>\n
The shift towards spending tourism dollars domestically helped boost the Canadian economy by millions of dollars a day, according to Moneris.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you think about businesses in Canada and merchants in Canada, tourism is so important to what they do,\u201d said Moira A. McDonald, school director and associate professor with the Master of Arts in Tourist Management at Royal Roads University.<\/p>\n
Moneris said year-over-year interprovincial spending across the country has increased by five per cent. The territories increased ten per cent in spending volume. Alberta went up by nine per cent and Saskatchewan increased six per cent.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is great news and we are just very, very thankful to Canadians who took this step,\u201d said McDonald. \u201cCanadians took this step and they really talked with their actions.\u201d<\/p>\n
McDonald also told CTV News the tourism industry in Canada is thriving with skilled workers needed in many areas.<\/p>\n
According to the university, the American tourism market has seen a major decline, not just in individual travelling, but also for conferences and school trips.<\/p>\n
Until political tensions with the U.S. ease, it\u2019s expected Canadians will continue to explore different regions of Canada and spend their money here.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell done Canada for just supporting who we are,\u201d McDonald said. \u201cWe want to really support our local economies and you really saw that this year and the numbers are there to support that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite the increase in travel within Canada, travel to Mexico, South America and Europe<\/a> was also up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canadian tourism up 30 per cent as many choose to spend within Canada. It\u2019s being called \u201cgreat news\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":138348,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[712,49,48,44],"class_list":{"0":"post-138347","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-canada","8":"tag-apple-news","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=138347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138347\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/138348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}