If you think there are fewer visitors from Canada and international locations this summer, you’re right.
The rhetorical squabbling between Canadian officials and President Donald Trump, who has mused since January that he would like to make Canada the 51st U.S. state, has spilled over into the much-relied-upon tourism and hospitality industry in the Northeast.
In May, the number of Candians returning to the country from travel abroad was down 16.7% from May 2024, marking the fourth consecutive month of year-over-year declines, according to Statistics Canada, the government’s data collection agency. The U.S. Travel Association says there has been a 20.2% decrease in the number of Canadians visiting the U.S.
Alexis Wyant, innkeeper of The Henry Collins Inn, says she would welcome more than a dozen Canadian tourists to her Newport lodgings in a typical summer season.
So far this year?
“I haven’t had a single one,” she said. “My only international guests were a family from Australia, which I assume is because they booked so far out that they didn’t want to cancel.”
Wyant worries that the trend of fewer foreign visitors is going to last, damaging the city’s hospitality sector.
Still, tourism agency Discover Newport isn’t declaring an emergency on Aquidneck Island just yet, in part because it says visitors closer to home are making up the difference.
“While some industry stakeholders have reported a decline in Canadian visitation, the region overall is tracking toward a strong and successful summer season,” Victoria Cimino, Discover Newport CEO and president, said in a statement.
Meanwhile, tourism officials in Providence – where international visitors are a much smaller segment of the tourism economy – are feeling indirect trepidation.
Kristen Adamo, CEO and president of the Providence Warwick Convention & Visitors Bureau, says her organization is keeping close tabs on how the drop in Canadian visitation is playing out in Boston, normally not a direct tourism market competitor with Providence.
That could change, Adamo says, if hoteliers and others in the Boston hospitality industry start slashing hotel rates and booking prices in a bid of woo more domestic travelers who might normally use Providence as a lower-cost base to visit Boston, too.
“It’s definitely a threat,” she said.
R.I. Commerce Corp. has previously said international travelers to Rhode Island reach roughly 180,000 annually, with 44% hailing from Canada and Mexico. Travelers from Montreal and Toronto represent the majority of those visitors.
The analytics firm Tourism Economics recently reported that travel from Canada to the U.S. continues to plummet. In the first five months of the year, the number of Canadians returning from visits to the U.S. by air fell by 16.9% and those crossing the border on land declined by 27.3%.
Elected officials in the tourism-dependent U.S. Northeast have been compelled to act.
In early June, Canadian delegations from Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador traveled to Boston at the invitation of Mass. Gov. Maura Healey, who was joined by governors from the other New England states and New York, including Gov. Daniel J. McKee.
A joint letter signed by the seven governors noted “a cherished relationship that is founded not only on mutual financial advantages but also on centuries-old familial and cultural bonds that supersede politics.”
Healey said the drop in Canadian visitors to New England states has reached between 20% and 60% compared with last year.
Meanwhile, R.I. Commerce Corp., the agency that oversees the statewide tourism effort, is searching for a new state commerce secretary and a chief marketing officer. Former Commerce Secretary Elizabeth M. Tanner stepped down in early July and former CMO Anika Kimble-Huntley left at the end of April.
R.I. Commerce Corp. CEO and President James S. Bennett has been named interim R.I. commerce secretary. n
