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CBS News
26-05-2025
- Business
- CBS News
What a slowdown in international travel could mean for America's tourist hubs
Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan is a small city with a thriving economy. That's because visitors from its larger northern sister city in Ontario, Canada, keep the border town's economy humming. Situated on opposite sides of the St. Marys River, the U.S. and Canadian counterparts are connected by the Sault Ste. Marie International Bridge, over which thousands of vehicles pass each month. "It's so intertwined," said Linda Hoath, executive director of the Sault Area Convention & Visitors Bureau, who noted that many people have family members on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border. "There's no separation between the two communities," she said. But with the U.S. trade war unleashed against Canada in recent months — along with reports of detentions of travelers at the Canadian border by U.S. immigration authorities and threats of annexation by President Trump, the chasm between the two neighbors has grown, as fewer Canadians make the trip south to the United States. According to Sault Ste. Marie's International Bridge Administration, the passenger car traffic in April was down 44% compared with last year. And while the waning bridge traffic may not mean much from the view of Canada's second-largest province and most popular destination, to the historic Michigan town it certainly does. "They have 70,000 people," Hoath said. "And if they're not coming over and buying in our stores, then it affects us much more." Slowdown in travel to the U.S. Sault Ste. Marie is not alone in its tourism concerns. Though travel this Memorial Day weekend is expected to be the highest on record, one group has been noticeably absent at U.S. travel checkpoints in recent months: international travelers. International travel to the U.S. fell 14% in March compared with the same period last year, according to the the U.S. Travel Association. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the biggest dip in travel, 20.2%, was from Canada, according to research from Tourism Economics, a unit of investment advisory firm Oxford Economics. Earlier this year, former Prime Minister Trudeau urged Canadians to refrain from vacationing in the U.S., after President Trump slapped a 25% tariff on Canadian goods. The drop-off in Canadian travel is a notable shift, given that Canada was the biggest source of inbound travel to the U.S. last year, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. As to what's behind the overall slowdown in international travel to the U.S., experts point to the Trump administration's stricter immigration policies, the strength of the U.S. dollar and long visa wait times. Aggressive tariff policies have also left a bad taste in many travelers' mouths. "Shifting sentiment and perceptions of the U.S. are expected to continue to weigh heavily on travel demand," said Aran Ryan, director of industry studies at Tourism Economics. As of April, flight bookings to the U.S. for the May–July travel window are 10.8% lower than they were the same period last year, according to the research firm. It projects an 8.7% decline in international arrivals in 2025. Economic Impact The slowdown in international travel threatens to destabilize America's tourism industry which plays a vital role in supporting the nation's economy. "International inbound travel is hugely important from an economic standpoint — people that come to the U.S. and visit spend on average $4,000 per visit," a spokesperson from the U.S. Travel Association, told CBS MoneyWatch. Those dollars may already be slipping away: The World Travel & Tourism Council projects that spending by international visitors to the U.S. will drop to $169 billion, or 7%, this year, from $181 billion in 2024. That's a 22.5% decrease from peak tourist spending of $217 billion in 2019, before the pandemic. Fewer international travelers could also take a toll on the workforce that props up America's tourism industry: Nearly 10% of American jobs are tied to the travel industry, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. An ongoing decline in international travel to the U.S. could result in a loss of over 230,000 jobs — with the dining and lodging industries expected to be the most hard hit, according to a recent analysis from the economic research firm IMPLAN. "It's not going to devastate the U.S. economy in terms of GDP, but it is very significant in terms of employment," Jenny Thorvaldson, IMPLAN's chief economist and data officer, told CBS MoneyWatch. Hoath, who runs the visitor center in Sault Ste. Marie, said she is already worried about what those losses could mean for her community. "When we're looking at the bridge and it's packed, people have to get their employees together," she said. "But if it's not so busy, what happens to your employees? They're not making the money. Some people will be laid off." Hotel bookings in the city of 14,000 are already down 77% year to date, according to the Sault Area Convention & Visitors Bureau. Shifting focus to domestic travelers As international tourism dampens, local communities like Flagstaff, Arizona, are rerouting their attention to domestic travelers. Despite the city's wide international appeal, the travel season has gotten off to a slow start. Flagstaff has seen a 15% to 20% drop in international tourists year over year, according to Trace Ward, director of Flagstaff's Convention and Visitors Bureau. While he hopes that decline will only be temporary, Ward is looking for ways to bring in more American tourists. One strategy he has in mind is adding more direct flights to the area and possibly attracting a new airline. The city is also promoting its Lowell Observatory's new Astronomy Discovery Center, which offers visitors a glimpse of the cosmos. "I look forward to the excitement of the international traveler coming back full steam, but until then, we're gonna sell to whoever is interested in coming here," Ward said. Hoath, likewise, has shifted her focus toward attracting visitors from within the States, and has decided to halt spending on any advertising in Canada. "When you don't have a ton of funds, you've got to put them where you know they have a better possibility of working," she said.
CTV News
22-05-2025
- CTV News
Canadian car trips returning from U.S. down 31 per cent in March
Vehicles approach the United States border crossing as seen from Saint-Bernard-de-Lacolle, Que., Thursday, April 10, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes Travel between Canada and the United States continues to steeply drop, new data from Statistics Canada shows. In March this year, Canadian residents made 4.3 million trips returning from abroad, a 14.9 per cent decrease from the same month in 2024, in what the agency calls the third consecutive month of year-to-year declines. Among the steepest drops were returning trips by car over the Canada-U.S. land border, down 31.4 per cent to 1.7 million trips in March. Trips to Canada among U.S. residents also fell, down 6.6 per cent from March 2024. Statistics Canada notes that on a seasonally adjusted basis, which accounts for calendar effects like holidays and the number of weekends in a month, U.S. travel to Canada rose slightly, up 2.8 per cent between February and March. Return trips for Canadian travellers declined even accounting for those quirks, however, down 7.1 per cent overall and down 11.7 per cent among automobile trips to the United States.
The Guardian
08-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Trump fixates on US-Canada border – does he actually want to tear it up?
When Canada's prime minister, Mark Carney, met with Donald Trump at the White House this week, the notoriously over-prepared former central banker was no doubt expecting to discuss tariffs, trade and defence policy. But as he sat beside the president, he was instead treated to a discourse on one of Trump's more recondite fixations: the centuries-old border between Canada and the United States. 'Somebody drew that line many years ago with, like, a ruler – just a straight line right across the top of the country,' he told Carney and the mass of assembled reporters. In recent months, Trump has fixated both on the idea of annexing Canada – his nation's closest ally and one of its largest trading partners – and the idea that the border between them is no more than an 'artificially drawn line' that, with force and persuasion, might be redrawn. 'We know what he's doing there: he's just being a troll. He's just trying to create some chaos and some discussion. He's not on a journey of intellectual discovery, trying to actually understand borders,' said Stephen Bown, author of Dominion: the Railway and the Rise of Canada. 'But he's not entirely inaccurate either.' A glance at the map of North America reveals the clean, crisp and unbroken line that spans the Lake of the Woods and then reaches to the Pacific Ocean, neatly tracing the 49th parallel. That line was agreed on over the course of a string of negotiations between 1783 and 1846, when much of the relevant region had still not even been seen by European settlers. 'It's not like the British and the Americans had a map and they drew a ruler on it. They didn't have a map, and they just agreed upon this imaginary line: the 49th parallel. They just projected these imaginary lines further on to a geography that they didn't know anything about,' said Bown. Surveys of the lands would have revealed a far more complicated reality, which in many places makes the border nonsensical on the ground. In some place, it cuts the wrong way through mountain valleys; elsewhere, rivers wind back and forth across the frontier. And across its length, the border ignores traditional Indigenous territories. 'It runs counter to geographical or cultural sense,' said Bown. 'It was just political will to put it there – and political will based in ignorance.' At the time, the American and British Empires were racing to conquer territory and expand, while at the same time seeking to avoid all-out conflict. 'It was the era of manifest destiny. And I think those Donald Trump comments could have been lifted from the mid-19th century,' said Bown. 'They're almost like a like manifest destiny 2.0.' Trump, who in the meeting with Carney said he considered himself a 'very artistic person', insists that he is inspired by the potential beauty of a unified continent. 'When you look at that beautiful formation, when it's together … you know, I said, 'That's the way it was meant to be',' the president said. During a February phone call with Carney's predecessor, Trump raised a 1908 treaty which demarcates the border, telling Justin Trudeau that he did not believe it was valid, and threatening to revisit US assent to the deal. The prime minister's staff were taken aback, one source told the Guardian, adding that few officials were familiar with the 117-year-old pact. And for good reason: the treaty – formally known as the Treaty Between the United States of America and the United Kingdom Concerning the Boundary Between the United States and the Dominion of Canada from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, and signed by representatives of President Theodore Roosevelt and King Edward VII – is merely a technical document. 'Trump's fixation on that treaty has always puzzled me, because it was the least consequential of all the treaties,' Peter Hahn, a professor of American history at Ohio State University. 'The 1908 settlement was really just kind of a technical adjustment of the more consequential decisions that had been made by diplomatic compromise and mutual agreement across the 19th century.' Beginning with the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and concluding with the Oregon Treaty in 1846, the political geography of North America was decided by imperial powers. 'The 1908 treaty really just simply said that the two powers would apply modern technology to define, by joint survey, exactly where the 49th parallel was,' said Hahn. 'It is really the treaty of least importance.' Hahn says Trump's repeated assertions that the lines are 'arbitrary' are both correct – but also reflect the capricious and erratic way in which all modern borders come to exist. 'They could have compromised at the 48th parallel. They could have compromised the 50th parallel, but they decided on the 49th parallel after haggling and considering what to do. And in that sense, all borders are arbitrary,' he said. 'The border of Washington DC was arbitrary. So too are the property lines around Mar-a-Lago. It was all the product of human action and human decision-making. And in the case of the US-Canadian border, it was done so the two could get along, avoid all-out conflict and move on to more important things.' Nonetheless, Hahn warned that abandoning a border treaty would violate international law and be a move 'fraught with peril' that would put the bilateral relationship in uncharted territory. 'The US government signed the treaty. The US Senate ratified it. It was ratified by the other side. So it takes on legal force,' he said, adding that Trump had been able to blithely suggest tearing up the border agreements 'because very few people understand that history or know the details. They just assume that, you know, if he's talking about 1908 that must be the one that matters.' And as on so many issues, experts are skeptical that Trump's stated opinion actually reflects a policy position. Hahn suggested that rather than seriously intending to reopen border negotiations, Trump is instead hoping to use the subject as a bargaining chip in other areas. 'It's important to remember that President Trump has a certain leadership style that is based on saying outrageous things to stir up controversy and to provoke his political critics and opponents. He seems to thrive on attention, whether it's positive or negative,' he said. 'A lot of what he's saying on this issue is bluster, because it fulfils that political strategy that any attention is a good thing, even if it's negative attention.'
