Did you hear? Official Airline Guide (OAG) says that bookings from Canada to the U.S. are down a staggering 70% for the summer.
“Passenger bookings on Canada – US routes are currently down by 70% compared to the same period last year,” claims the ancient and honorable travel publication,
“The decline is striking – bookings are down by over 70% in every month through to the end of September,” said OAG. “This sharp drop suggests that travellers are holding off on making reservations, likely due to ongoing uncertainty surrounding the broader trade dispute.”
Outside of some snippy Canadian politicians, there hasn’t been much blowback from Canada’s citizens. There haven’t been any large protests at the border. Americans aren’t harassed any more than usual on the streets of Canada’s big cities. The Canadian left is … well, the Canadian left. They hate conservatives in America because we give Canadian conservatives good ideas.
So you can be forgiven if you looked at that 70% fewer travel bookings to the United States from Canada figure and wondered if it was really true.
It isn’t.
“Air Canada, WestJet and Porter Airlines are strongly disputing a report that says Canadian flight bookings to the US are down 70%. One Canadian airline executive says the report is ‘dead wrong,’” according to the Canadian travel website OpenJaw.
“The OAG data are dead wrong, and we have told them so,” the executive said. “Those numbers are not approaching reality.”
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So, some media outlets “misinterpreted” the OAG numbers. In fact, most major American media outlets leapt upon the fake news like starving dogs even after several other smaller outlets had debunked the story.
“Air Travel from Canada to U.S. Nosedives 70%,” claimed Inc on March 26.
“Flight bookings between Canada and US down 70%” The Guardian gravely reported on March 27.
“Canadian travelers are taking their loonies elsewhere, tanking demand for U.S. flights,” claimed USA Today. On March 29.
Canadian airlines tried to push back against the U.S. media’s eagerness to show how Trump’s tariff policies were backfiring.
An Air Canada spokesman said the 70% figure isn’t in line with what Air Canada is seeing.
“Several media have reported on a blog based upon preliminary OAG data, stating that advanced bookings between Canada and the US are down about 70% compared to last year,” spokesman Christophe Hennebelle said in an email to Open Jaw. “However, we can confirm that this is not reflective of Air Canada’s booking patterns, nor the state of the market, based on all information sources available to us.
“While we have experienced a softening in the transborder market – and have shifted a limited amount of capacity to adapt to it as previously announced – the decline Air Canada has experienced is not of the magnitude cited in the blog,” Hennebelle said. “According to our information, when aggregating all indirect and direct booking channels, the decline is significantly less.
Fortune Magazine says that the softening in the air travel industry is due to Canada’s economy more than Trump’s tariffs. The magazine says that Air Canada’s bookings to the U.S. are down only 10%.
What Canadians have always resented about America is that Americans tend to see Canadians as being just like Americans. Canadians hate that view and take great pains to remind American tourists that they are in a foreign country.
For all of that, they are lovely, friendly people who never turn up their noses to the Yankee dollar. As with Canadian left-wing politicians, this too shall pass.
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