More Canadians are ditching US road trips with 38% annual drop

Cross-border road trips to the US from Canada fell for a fifth straight month, a gloomy outlook for many American vacation spots once frequented by their northern neighbors during the peak summer travel season.

Canadian-resident return trips by automobile from the US tumbled 38.1% in May from a year ago, Statistics Canada data showed Tuesday. Since January, Canadians returned from 2.5 million fewer car trips to the US than they did in the same five-month period last year. 

Deliberately avoiding US trips and products has become a movement among Canadians who want to show patriotism in the face of President Donald Trump’s threats to their country’s economy and sovereignty. That’s even as a weakening US dollar against the loonie this year boosts Canadians’ spending power. 

Canadians — who made up more than a quarter of US international visitors last year — are leading travelers globally in choosing alternate destinations. The overall tourism decline threatens to wipe out $12.5 billion from the American economy this year. Canadians’ return trips by air from other countries grew 9.8% in May, compared with a drop of 24.2% from the US.

The US runs nearly a $300 billion surplus in services trade, in part due to large inflows of foreign visitors, and a 20% drop in the number of international visitors could knock about 0.2 percentage points off gross domestic product, Bradley Saunders, economist at Capital Economics, wrote in a note on Monday. 

The number of US car trips to Canada also fell, dropping 8.4% in May. Some Canadians choosing to stay close to home may help fill the gap in the coming months — similar to how summer flight searches to Caribbean countries already rose by 22% from a year ago, with at least a half-dozen island nations so far seeing gains in Canadian arrivals.