BURST
The number of Canadians flying into the U.S. from Vancouver fell for 10 straight months last year, according to the latest data from Statistics Canada .
The biggest drop came in November, the most recent month for which data is available.
About 230,000 people flew from Vancouver to the U.S. in November, nearly 11 per cent fewer than the same time period in 2024. The number of travellers flying from Vancouver to international destinations other than the U.S. were up by more than 12 per cent in the same time period.
“People who would have normally been like, ‘Hey, let’s go to Disneyland’ or Hawaii are looking at alternative options,” said Nitin Gaba, director of operations at Gaba Travel , an agency headquartered in Vancouver.
“People are worried,” Gaba said. “They read the news, but they also hear a lot of rumours.”
He said clients don’t want to deal with stress at the border or spend their vacations “stressed that something might happen.”
“We actually had a decent 25- or 30-people cruise group that was booked on a Caribbean cruise for this March — booked over a year ago — and the group decided that they don’t want to go anymore because it required flying into Miami,” Gaba said.
Michael Scott-Iversen, owner of the North Vancouver Hagan’s Travel and Cruises office, said he nearly had to write off a full tour group headed to Santa Fe, New Mexico, last summer, when half of the 25-person group cancelled their reservations.
“They walked away from an $800 deposit. And my wait list of 12, nobody took me up on it,” he said.
He managed to scrape together enough people to fill about two-thirds of the space, but lost several thousand dollars on the trip.
Canada-wide, U.S.-bound flights were down 13.5 per cent this past November, compared to the same period in 2024. Toronto experienced the largest drop, at 13.7 per cent, followed by Montreal at 13.2 per cent and Calgary at 12.5 per cent.
The four airports account for 90 per cent of all U.S.-bound air traffic, according to Statistics Canada.
Instead of U.S. trips, local travel agencies, including Gaba Travel, are booking more trips to Mexico, the Caribbean, Europe, even domestically, depending on the time of year.
“In the summer, we saw a lot of travel within Canada that we hadn’t seen before,” said Scott-Iversen.
Gaba said winter travellers are choosing Mexico and the Caribbean and heading to Europe in the summer. He said people who might have gone to the U.S. for bachelor parties were staying home, and travel to the U.S. for weddings “completely dried up”.
The decline in U.S.-bound passengers was part of a larger pattern of Canadians avoiding travel to the U.S. The number of vehicles with B.C. plates crossing the border last November was down 39 per cent compared to the same period in 2024.
Neither Gaba nor Scott-Iversen would say if U.S. travel would pick up anytime soon.
“I don’t see this changing for three more years,” Scott-Iversen said. “Business is gone. People are finding different places to travel than the States, if they can. And if they are going to the States, they’re sort of apologizing for it.”