If your town or business depends heavily on international tourism, I have some bad news about at least the next six months and likely much longer — air travel between Canada and the U.S. has collapsed. That may sound like clickbait hyperbole, but it’s hard to think of a less dramatic way to word what the data shows. OAG, an aviation analytics firm, just released new data on U.S.-Canadian air travel for April through September, and bookings are down more than 70 percent, the Guardian reports. Even if your livelihood isn’t directly tied to tourism, you don’t have to be an expert to understand that’s bad news.
OAG’s analysis compared the April-to-September flights that were already booked between our two countries in March 2024 and March 2025 and found Canada-to-U.S. bookings had dropped between 71 and 76 percent year-over-year. July and August saw the biggest drops, which is especially bad news since those are the most popular travel months. Airlines have already cut capacity, too, removing more than 320,000 seats from flights traveling between our two countries. For some reason, they don’t want to operate empty flights or something. Who could have guessed?
Now, it’s entirely possible things could change in the next few months, and the U.S. tourism industry will be saved, but it’s also possible a casting director could stop me on the street and offer me a role in a big Hollywood movie filming in Atlanta this summer. Possible does not mean likely.
Canadian tourism in the U.S.
Those who frequently encounter Canadian tourists likely understand losing their money is going to be bad, but even they may have a hard time truly wrapping their minds around the scale of Canadian tourism. As the U.S. Travel Association explained last month, Canadians’ 20.4 million visits in 2024 made our northern neighbor the top source of international visitors, and they spent a collective $20.5 billion while they were here. Their tourism also supports about 140,000 jobs that may be lost if they don’t show up in similar numbers this year.
At the time, the non-tennis USTA pointed out that a 10 percent drop could mean “2.0 million fewer visits, $2.1 billion in lost spending and 14,000 job losses.” If the drop in flight bookings is a trend that holds, we’re looking at losses that are seven times worse than that. OAG’s analysis only focused on Canada, too. It still hasn’t revealed what bookings from other major tourist countries look like, but it’s probably safe to guess they aren’t great.
Unfortunately for all of us, the fallout from the decline in tourist spending won’t be contained to the tourism industry, either. People who lose their jobs as a result will also have to cut back on their spending, creating a ripple effect that will likely be felt the strongest in states such as Florida, California, Nevada, New York and Texas. Those states each stand to lose billions, much of which would have been spent supporting local businesses.
Why would international tourists risk visiting?
When Republicans started their latest trade war with countries that were previously our allies, we all knew it would sour those relationships. The Canadian government instituted retaliatory tariffs, and the Canadian people began intentionally avoiding products that were made in the U.S. or produced by U.S. companies. And yet, if you think the drastic drop in Canadians visiting the U.S. is just about tariffs, you couldn’t possibly be more mistaken.
Arguably, Trump’s repeated claims that Canada should become the 51st state and Republicans’ support for that idea have done far more to convince Canadians to spend their money elsewhere than the tariffs have. There’s just something about saying you want to annex a former ally that really makes people dislike you, apparently. When countries invade other countries, people die, and while Canada isn’t backing down, it’s also understandably angry by being threatened like this. Even if the tariffs disappeared tomorrow, good luck repairing that relationship while Trump continues repeating the 51st state “joke.”
Of course, that isn’t the whole story, either. As PBS reports, international tourists keep getting detained and held for undetermined periods without access to their lawyers. Why was this Canadian citizen held for two weeks? No one has a good answer. And that’s all before you get to the part where people here perfectly legally keep getting disappeared by the feds without due process. Even if you haven’t committed a crime, the U.S. could still label you a terrorist and ship you off to one of the worst prisons in the world. Whether they don’t want to support such horrific treatment or are simply looking out for their own safety, it’s completely understandable that tourism is drying up.
Sadly, even after Trump’s gone, the damage will have already been done. It’s going to take years, and maybe even decades, to rebuild our relationship with Canada and every other country whose tourism dollars we depend on. But hey, at least everything’s also going to get more expensive for regular Americans, too. Wait, that’s also bad news. Seriously, would it kill these people to give us some good news to report every now and then?
