Fewer Ontario residents are skiing south of the border amid Canada-U.S. tensions: travel regulator

Fewer Ontario residents are visiting U.S. ski resorts due to political uncertainty and the ongoing trade war, according to the Travel Industry Council of Ontario (TICO). 

The province’s travel regulator told CBC Toronto the number of Ontario residents travelling across the border dropped by about 40 per cent last year compared to the year before.

Dash Hegeman, director of marketing at Holiday Valley Ski Resort in Ellicottville, N.Y. — about a 3.5-hour drive from Toronto — says he still sees plenty of Canadian license plates in the resort parking lot, but he’s expecting fewer cross-border visits for March Break this year. 

“Historically we've had a good number of Canadian school clubs that have come down,” he said. “And so a number of those have just decided that they're not going to allow travel across the border.” 

Travel from Canada to the U.S. has decreased significantly in the past year, with Statistics Canada data showing a 30.9 per cent drop in the number of Canadian vehicles crossing into the U.S. last year compared to 2024. 

TICO’S CEO, Richard Smart, linked the decline to Canada’s strained relations with its neighbour to the south.  

“[It’s] not surprising with everything that's going on geopolitically, trade-wise, with tariffs, and so on,” he said. “Ontarians and Canadians are looking for alternatives.”

Dan Kelleher, president and CEO of the Regional Office of Sustainable Tourism for the Adirondack Mountains area, says the tourism industry has felt the impact.

“We're estimating that we've lost roughly $14 million in our region from lost sales to Canadians not coming,” he said. 

This all comes at a time when resorts in the region are still recovering from the drop in visitors they saw during the pandemic. 

U.S. resorts lost foreign customers when travel was restricted, said Tait Wardlaw, vice president of sales, marketing and communications for the Olympic Regional Development Authority, which manages the Whiteface Mountain Ski Resort in Lake Placid, N.Y.

“Canadians couldn’t come down for two years and that was brutal,” he said, adding that the hill is usually attracts lots of visitors from Ottawa and Montreal. 

Before the pandemic, Canadian visitors made up about 15 per cent of their day pass and season pass sales, Wardlaw said. 

“In 2022 that number had recovered to about 10 per cent and it's been stable … until this past year,” he said.