The number of travellers visiting Canada has increased over the past four years, but is still below pre-pandemic levels, a new Statistics Canada report states.
The latest StatsCan travel report says roughly 3.6 million non-residents visited Canada in June 2024. That's down 6.3% compared to June 2019, the last summer before pandemic travel restrictions put a major crimp in Canadian visitation stats.
US residents in June took 2.9 million trips to Canada, up 9.2% from the 2.7 million trips taken during the same month in 2023.
That’s just 3.4% short of June 2019, pre-pandemic levels.
Just shy of 746,000 overseas residents arrived in Canada in June. That’s an increase of 6.3% from the 701,700 arrivals observed in the same month in 2023, but it’s only 83.9% of pre-pandemic numbers. Looked at another way, it’s 16.1% fewer visitors than in June of 2019.
“China was our number one international (overseas) market prior to the pandemic, Andrew Weir, president of Destination Toronto, told me in an interview earlier this year. "We had 300,000 Chinese visitors to Toronto. But we’re only at 10% of that."
U.S. and domestic visitors are great, but Canadian cities need higher spending international visitors, Weir said.
“International visitors spend more, do more, stay longer, and do more to help our businesses.”
Destination Canada recently launched its new tourism strategy, ‘A World of Opportunity, ‘ which focuses on transforming the Canadian tourism sector and catapulting Canada back into the top seven global destinations by 2030.
The strategy is designed to increase Canada’s global competitiveness and bring in up to $160 billion in annual revenue by 2030, “transcending the traditional constraints that currently cap the tourism industry’s potential at $140 billion.”
In addition to looking at inbound Canadian visitation numbers, the June StatsCan report said Canadian residents returned from 3.8 million trips abroad in June, an increase of 12.0% from June 2023 (3.4 million). That level represents 90.0% of such trips taken during the same month in 2019 (4.3 million).
