Headlines have detailed how this summer’s resurgence of travel has overwhelmed Canada’s air industry, with Canada’s transport minister calling on airlines to explain how they planned to get their operations ramped up smoothly, and the minister himself called on the carpet in front of the House of Commons transport committee last week to answer for the government’s role in airport chaos this summer.
But a new Statistics Canada report is now giving us a clearer picture of Canadians’ travel patterns in the first ‘high season’ since the pandemic took hold.
A spike in travel is undeniable - even though numbers still fall short of pre-pandemic levels.
What’s surprising is where travel has - as a percentage of pre-pandemic volume - rebounded the most.
Anecdotally, we’ve been hearing that Canadians have been sticking close to home this first, post-pandemic summer of travel. A preference for domestic - air or land - trips may be true. But StatsCan’s numbers showing how many Canadians travelled outside of Canada indicate international travel has been the biggest winner this summer.
Overall Outbound Travel
In JUN 2022, seven times as many Canadians left our borders than in JUN 2021.
2.6 million Canadians departed Canada that month - but that’s less than 60 per cent of the number who travelled outside of Canada in JUN 2019.
Travel to the U.S.
2 million Canadians travelled to the U.S. in JUN this year, less than two-thirds the number in the same month of 2019.
Breaking down those trips by land and air is revealing.
1.5 million Canadians crossed into the U.S. at a land border, three-quarters of the total American-bound trips. And two-thirds of those trips were day trips.
That’s a five-fold increase over land trips to the U.S. in the same month of 2021, but just over half the volume in 2019.
Air travel to the U.S. rebounded even more, and came closer to closing the gap with pre-pandemic levels.
Nearly half a million Canadians travelled to the U.S. by air in JUN, 2022. That’s way up (17 times) the number of U.S. bound air pax in the same month last year, when only 25,000 Canadians flew across the border.
This JUN’s volumes represent just over 70 per cent of the number of air travellers to the U.S. in JUN 2019.
International Travel
In JUN 2019, nearly 600,000 Canadians travelled overseas. That’s not only up “sharply,” according to StatsCan, from last JUN, when just one-tenth of that number of Canadians went abroad.
International travel numbers in JUN come closest to returning to pre-pandemic levels, “the highest level of recovery to date,” says Statistics Canada, representing close to three-quarters of pre-pandemic levels of volume.
Comparing JUN 2022 to the same month in 2019 shows that international travel (recovered to almost 75 per cent of pre-pandemic levels) beat both travel to the U.S. by air (recovered to 70 per cent of pre-pandemic levels) and travel to the U.S. by land (recovered to just half of pre-pandemic levels.)
