Canadians ditch US travel for three domestic cities after Trump's '51st state' threat
Topics: Canada, Donald Trump, Travel, Politics
William Morgan
Featured Image Credit: Lokman Vural Elibol/Anadolu via Getty Images
Topics: Canada, Donald Trump, Travel, Politics
America's 'neighbors to the north' seem to be spending less time and money on traveling to the US according to new data, gathered after President Trump's furious threat to annex Canada.
Although the president's maximalist negotiating positions rarely play out in reality and have even gained the acronym TACO (Trump Always Chicken Out), this insult to the territorial integrity of Canada has clearly landed poorly north of the border.
Year-on-year, the number of Canadians spending their tourist dollars in America has taken a sharp tumble since President Trump threatened to turn the autonomous nation into 'our cherished Fifty First State,' if Ottawa did not cave to his trade demands.
Data gathered at eight of Canada's largest airports show that tens of thousands of potential tourists have been deterred from visiting the US in the past year alone, with passenger numbers plummeting by seven percent and airlines responding by canceling services for the summer.
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From March 2025 to the same period in 2026, this means that the total number of Canadians visiting the states from these eight airports has fallen to 1.2 million, despite the actual passenger numbers at each airport increasing in the past 12 months.
Three travel hubs even saw double-digit increases in travelers over this period of decline in tourism to America, with Halifax/Robert L. Stanfield International Airport experiencing a 15 percent surge in 2025/2026, the National Post reports.
Two other cities have also been major benefactors from this fall in American tourism, with Toronto's airport seeing a 14 point bump in passengers in the same period and Calgary welcoming an increase of 11 percent in footfall.
While these airport figures show a decline in air travel to the US from Canada since President Trump began his trade war over the country's dairy, steel, and automotive industries, other data helps to paint the full picture of what has happened in the past 12 months.
Short-term accommodation giant Airbnb recently released a report into this trend, showing how many Canadians are increasingly choosing to vacation at home amid Trump's threats, as well as his crackdown at the border and on immigration more widely.
The report found: "Canadians chose to explore their own country in record numbers in 2025, with over 9.5 million domestic guest arrivals, accounting for over 60 per cent of all trips on Airbnb — up more than 50 per cent since 2019."
Digging into the data, many of these Airbnb users are taking their trips at an extremely local level, with a surge of Canadians booking accommodation in their own home state. In total, these close-to-home stays accounted for between 50 and 70 percent of bookings.
And this collapse in Canadian travel to the US may just be a symptom of a wider problem facing the American tourism sector, with the World Travel and Tourism Council detailing a drop in visitor numbers of 5.5 percent since 2024, with tourist spending falling by 4.6 percent to $176 billion.
But with the FIFA World Cup and its estimated 1.2 million soccer-mad tourists barely a month away, it's likely the loss of Canadian visitors south of the border will be more than made up for.