renewed tensions<\/a> could make a rapid recovery less likely.<\/p>\n Want more Business Insider in your news feed?<\/p>\n
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“The 2025 numbers suggest that we are looking at more than a temporary reaction to one political announcement or one round of tariffs,” she said. “We are seeing evidence of a broader change in Canadian travel sentiment and, potentially, travel habits.”<\/p>\n
Canadians found other places to go<\/p>\n
Flight Center Travel Group Canada’s data show that US leisure bookings have improved from last year’s lows, but remain below their pre-pullback levels.<\/p>\n
New US leisure bookings made from January through August for travel this year were down 7.4% from the same period in 2025, while turnover slipped 1%, Flight Center said. July bookings rose 5.7% from July 2025 but remained 39% below July 2024 levels.<\/p>\n
“We’re seeing improvement from the lows of 2025, but clearing a very weak 2025 bar is not the same as returning to previous travel patterns,” Amra Durakovic, Flight Center Travel Group Canada’s head of communications, told Business Insider.<\/p>\n
Fu said the real risk for US destinations is that Canadians may have developed new vacation habits.<\/p>\n
“Once travelers establish new vacation patterns, destinations have to compete to win them back,” she said.<\/p>\n
Domestic travel rose by 5 million visits in 2025, while overseas trips increased by 1.3 million, Statistics Canada said, with visits to Europe rising 13.6%, while visits to Asia climbed 16.7% last year.<\/p>\n
Economic fallout for the US<\/p>\n
The shift could carry an outsize cost for US tourism businesses.<\/p>\n
Leisure trips to the US fell by 21.5% in 2025, or by 3.2 million visits, Statistics Canada said.<\/p>\n
Canadian spending on US trips fell by $3.3 billion, to $18.8 billion in 2025. Leisure-travel spending fell by $2.2 billion, to $12.1 billion, accounting for most of the overall decline.<\/p>\n
“Many redirected their travel spending elsewhere,” Fu said. “This is not simply lost demand; it is demand being captured by competing destinations.”<\/p>\n
The effects could be felt most acutely in border communities and warm-weather destinations that depend on Canadian holidaymakers, she said. Those visitors support hotels, restaurants, attractions, retailers, rental-car companies, airlines, golf courses, and cruise businesses.<\/p>\n
Leisure matters especially because Canadians traveling abroad primarily for holidays spent nearly five times as much as those whose main purpose was visiting friends and relatives. Family-related US visits fell 9% in 2025, far less than leisure trips, per Statistics Canada.<\/p>\n
“In tourism, losing a visitor for one season is a revenue problem,” Fu said. “Losing that visitor’s habit is a market-share problem.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Canadians won’t stop giving US trips the cold shoulder. According to Statistics Canada’s National Travel Survey released Tuesday,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":826791,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[28,101],"class_list":["post-826790","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826790","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=826790"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/826790\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/826791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=826790"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=826790"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=826790"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}