Tourism is big business and it is almost back to levels we saw prior to the COVID pandemic.
We’ve just received a summary of travel and tourism data for the first quarter of this year which shows that levels are now at 90 per cent of pre-COVID levels. And, it seems, we are more likely to travel to the US in the first three months of the year than the other way round. In fact, Canadians heading south out-numbered Americans heading north by almost two-to-one.
And tourism is the primary reason for travel abroad. Nearly 3 million Canadians travelled south in the first three months of this year for holidays or leisure. You can roughly that many more who went to visit family or for personal reasons. By comparison, only 700,000 went for business purposes.
Coming this way, 1.6 million Americans travelled north in the first three months of the year for holidays or leisure. Another 1.2 million traveled to visit family or for personal reasons. Business travel, on the other hand, involved roughly one-quarter as many people.
