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.
