Spring break shakeup? Canadians taking fewer trips to the U.S., StatsCan says
Colin Bykowski usually crosses the Canada-U.S. border twice a month to buy groceries from Trader Joe’s and toys for his son at Target. The last time he made the trip was a month ago — and he doesn’t know when the next time will be.
“It’s funny…. This week we were planning on going, but we decided to make a different decision,” said Bykowski, who was shopping in Tsawwassen, B.C., just north of the border shared with Point Roberts, Wash.
“With what’s going on, we’re being a little bit more conscious with our buying decisions, and we’ll see going forward.”
Bykowski isn’t the only Canadian resident cutting back on visits to the United States. Data released by Statistics Canada on Monday shows that the number of return trips among Canadians travelling by car to the U.S. declined significantly in February, down 23 per cent compared with a year earlier.
Return trips made by air also dropped a smidge, declining 2.4 per cent on a yearly basis.
The figures come after weeks of stories from Canadians who opted to change or cancel a trip to the U.S. on account of President Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again tariffs against Canada: March break trips to Myrtle Beach, S.C., were rerouted to Mexico, snowbirds reconsidered their yearly vacations to Florida and anniversary trips to Las Vegas were scrapped.
Travellers ‘explicitly’ asking not to go to U.S., says agent
One Canadian travel agency even reported that leisure bookings to the U.S. (meaning travel for pleasure, not business) took a swan dive in February, plummeting 40 per cent compared with the same month last year.
The agency, Flight Centre Travel Group, noted that Canadians had not stopped travelling completely but rather were looking to travel to locations outside the U.S.
McKenzie McMillan, a travel consultant at the Travel Group in Vancouver, told CBC News that new bookings or requests for travel to the U.S. have almost completely evaporated this month compared with the same period a year ago.
- Are you thinking of travelling within Canada now in light of the trade war with the U.S.? We want to hear about your plans at ask@cbc.ca
He estimates, conservatively, that there’s been an 80 per cent decline in demand within his own agency during a time when people are usually booking last-minute trips for spring break or planning ahead on summer vacations.
“We’re not seeing any of that right now. In fact, the majority of our travel that we’re seeing now are requests coming in [from] clients that have explicitly said they do not want to go to the United States,” McMillan said.
Some clients are looking to travel domestically instead, he said, with eastern Canadians looking to head west, and western Canadians booking trips east. And some are still going forth with trips down south, he said.
“But future travel is where we’re seeing [what] seems to be a major long-term reduction in interest.”
Emotional, economic reasons are ‘a perfect storm’
A stronger U.S. dollar has always put negative pressure on Canadians’ ability or desire to travel to the U.S., said David Coletto, an Ottawa-based public opinion analyst and the chair and CEO of Abacus Data.
That, combined with the tariff threats and trade war, have created “a perfect storm, where you both have an economic and an emotional reason to change your plans,” he said.
People in Point Roberts, Wash., say they’re caught in the middle of the trade war between Canada and the U.S. The small border community relies on Canadians for business, electricity and water.
Research recently conducted by Abacus found that 56 per cent of surveyed Canadians who initially planned to travel to the U.S. this year had since scaled back or cancelled those plans, mostly in response to political tensions. Thirty-nine per cent of those planned to travel to a different country, and 19 per cent were planning trips within Canada.
As for what the absence of millions of Canadians could mean for the U.S. economy, some small businesses in border towns are already seeing a drop in northern visitors. The U.S. Travel Association said that a 10 per cent reduction in those visits could mean a $2.1-billion hit to the American economy and thousands of job losses.
“If there is an effect, that’s where Trump’s going to feel it. He’s going to have governors and congresspeople and senators calling them and saying, ‘Hey, you know, this policy is hurting our own communities,'” Coletto said.
“And maybe that creates enough pressure for him to reconsider.”
