Bucking The Trend

The parlous state of the dollar versus its US counterpart appears to be biting into the price-sensitive transborder drive segment but not the air travel market, according to Montreal editor, Mike Dunbar in this week’s digital edition of Canadian Travel Press.

That’s borne out by the latest crop of StatsCan numbers, which shows that overnight land traffic to the United States was down 6.9% in January – with day-tripping falling a whopping 14% — while the number of air travellers grew 5.7%.

It’s only the third January since record-keeping began in 1970 that the air travel total has exceeded the number of drive arrivals. Similar results were witnessed as long ago as January 1999 and 2000.

The number of land crossers who stayed at least one night plunged from 945,000 in Jan. 2014 to 770,000 this year but the air segment grew from 647,000 to more than 796,000 during the same period.

Meanwhile, US commerce department economist Mark Brown has produced an analysis of available StatsCan data to create a `hot’ and `cold’ list of non-US destinations for Canadians.

His `hot’ list features France, Spain, Britain, Ireland and Australia, while his `cold’ quartet names Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and China.

Brown expects his preliminary analysis to be confirmed next month when StatsCan issues its 2014 year-end report.

For the full story, click here, and check it out in this week’s digital edition of Canadian Travel Press.