Canadian leisure travel to U.S. down 40% in February, Flight Centre says

Tariff and annexation threats by U.S. President Donald Trump combined with a weak Canadian dollar have Canadians crossing the United States off their list of travel destinations.

Flight Centre Canada spokesperson Amra Durakovic said interest in U.S. travel began to wane in November. That trend saw explosive growth in February, with leisure travel bookings to the U.S. plunging 40 per cent year over year.

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“A lot of that has to do with the U.S. administration’s tariffs that were announced at the beginning of February, but also Prime Minister Trudeau encouraging Canadians not to travel to the U.S.,” Durakovic said.

“That’s quite a significant drop.”

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B.C.-based Travel Best Bets told Global News it had seen a similar trend.

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“Canadians are a really proud country and they’re angry and they have a big number of dollars to spend and they don’t want to be spending them in the U.S. right now,” Travel Best Bet president Claire Newell said.

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Canadians appear to be eschewing more than just air travel.

Recent data from Cascade Gateway, which also provides border wait times, found a drop of about 30 per cent in southbound travel at Surrey’s Peace Arch border crossing year over year in February.

And that was before the federal government applied a new surtax on items brought back into Canada from across the U.S. border.

Newell said Canadians have been looking further and further afield for vacation destinations.

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“They are going places that are anywhere but the U.S., but the most interest we are seeing is in places like Vietnam, Mexico, Portugal, eastern Europe so Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic.

“All of these places have one thing in common: they are not the U.S. Another thing, the dollar goes a lot farther.”

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Durakovic said there has also been a big uptick in interest in so-called “fly-and-drive” vacations, particularly to Canada’s East Coast, with car rentals and bus tours for the summer already filling up.

Those trends could be bad news for the U.S. tourism industry.

According to the U.S. Travel Association, Canadians made 20.4 million visits south of the border in 2024, shelling out US$20.5 billion.

The association estimated just a 10 per cent drop in Canadian travel would cost the industry US$2.1 billion and 14,000 jobs.