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Canadian visits to 267 U.S. cities are down — except for these three, that is
A large study of cellphone presence in more than 250 U.S. destinations reveals a sharp drop of up to 65 per cent in the number of Canadian visitors to American locations in the two years between April 2024 and March 2026.
Oddly, however, exactly three places showed an increase, in the form of a surge of between 21 and 35 per cent. Researchers are not sure why, but Gainesville Florida, Cleveland Ohio and Portland Oregon alone saw the number of Canadians shoot up, at least based on their cellphone usage.
Researchers at the School of Cities at the University of Toronto analyzed cellphone activity data from about seven million phones each month, finding a year-over-year decline of about 42 per cent in Canadian visits to U.S. metropolitan areas.
“This is significantly higher than the (roughly) 25 per cent drop recorded by border crossings estimates,” they wrote in an online post, referencing data from Statistics Canada. “This means that (a) border crossing data is not capturing the full drop in Canadian business and trade-related travel and (b) when Canadians travel to the U.S., they are visiting fewer locations and staying for less time than they used to.”
The data in chart form are shocking. Snowbird havens like Myrtle Beach, S.C., and Yuma, Ariz., have seen visits drop by more than 60 per cent. In chart form, two years of data looks like a heart monitor that shows several strong pulses before basically flat-lining.
Professor Karen Chapple , director of the School of Cities at the University of Toronto, told National Post in an interview that she was uncertain exactly why three relatively unremarkable cities were drawing more Canadian visitors. “We have puzzled over that one.”
Gainesville, with a population of just 141,000, is a university town and a sports hub. Its University of Florida campus is the third largest public university campus in the country by enrolment, and its Ben Hill Griffin Stadium seats 90,000.
“It’s not a snowbird thing,” Chapple said. “It could be something to do with sport travel, sports tournaments or student travel of some kind, or conferences. So I’m never surprised to see Gainesville pop up; it’s a big college place.”
But Cleveland and Portland are another matter. “What is going on there?” she said. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
Neither city is an economic or tourism powerhouse. With 365,000 people, Cleveland is only the second-largest city in Ohio by population and the 53rd in the U.S. Portland is a little higher up at number 28, with about 635,000 people.
“So there must have been some big event in Cleveland, and it could even have been related to the Blue Jays travelling and sports teams generally,” said Chapple.
“And Portland also, if you look at that trend, it was summer travel, and there’s a big bump up in late summer, and you’re not seeing that in some of the other places. So it suggests, again, there was some sort of festival or tourist attraction at that time that created kind of a blip.”
Both cities do have Major League Baseball teams that might draw fans of the Toronto Blue Jays, and Portland puts on its popular Rose Festival in May and June. However, neither one hosted a major conference in the summer months that would draw lots of Canadians, and in any case the trend has been for U.S. conferences to relocate to Canada during the Trump administration.
“We can only hypothesize,” Chapple said. “One of the interesting things we’re doing as a followup is we’re looking at correlations between this visitation rate and the composition regional economy.” She hopes to have more data on that front soon.
As to the decrease in so many other locations, Chapple said data from Statistics Canada doesn’t capture as much detail as her group’s cellphone numbers.
She points to Grand Rapids, Mich., a city about 250 kilometres west of the U.S./Canada border at Detroit and Windsor. It’s 23rd on the list of declining visitors, with a 53.2 per cent drop.
“If you look at the automobile industry, there’s very close relationships between establishments in Ontario and Grand Rapids,” she said. “That made us think it’s the tariffs and it’s trade related travel, not just tourism, which is what the media had picked up on. ‘Oh, the tourists are not going, the snowbirds are not going.’ That’s all true, but it’s also that the workers aren’t going. It’s related to trade and it’s related to fundamental shifts in work travel.”
She added that she has seen colleagues and students express a desire to avoid travel to the U.S. for meetings or conferences. “And so you’re seeing this massive shift back to Zoom; Zoom meetings for work, travel, where you would have seen before people making trips and making trips to multiple U.S. cities at the same time.”
The study authors in an online post add: “The introduction of major tariffs, such as the 25% tariff in automotive parts , may explain the reduction in trade-related trips beginning in April 2025. In addition, our data measures not only Canadians crossing the border, but also Canadians living temporarily in the U.S., suggesting that the decrease in activity may reflect return migration to Canada.”
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