Statistics Canada has just published its National Travel Survey and Visitor Travel Survey for the first quarter of 2026, and the report has some surprising facts. With 78.7 million Canadian residents taking trips within Canada and abroad, travel is up 1.5% from the same quarter in 2025, showing that folks are still travelling quite a lot this year.
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But where are Canadians travelling the most? Are they visiting domestically or internationally?
Here’s the highlights from the first quarter’s Travel Survey.
Canadian Travel Patterns in 2026
Visiting Domestically
According to Statistics Canada, Canadian residents took 69.1 million trips that included a domestic visit. This is 2.3% up on a year-over-year basis. On top of that, 48.8 million of the trips were same-day visits (+3.8%), and 20.4 million were overnight visits (-1.2%).
“From January to March 2026, Canadian residents spent $14.5 billion on domestic tourism, up 5.1% year over year. For same-day visits, Canadian residents spent an average of $101 per visit. For overnight visits, Canadian residents spent an average of $471 per visit, and the average visit length was 2.8 nights.”
Boycotting the U.S.
Most likely an effect of trade war tensions between Canada and the U.S., travel to the U.S. decreased while visits to overseas countries increased.
“Canadian residents took 5.5 million trips that included an outbound visit to the United States in the first quarter of 2026, a year-over-year decline of 10.6%… Expenditures during visits to the United States totalled $5.0 billion, down 13.6% from the first quarter of 2025.”
Where are Canadians Travelling to?
If you travelled to Mexico this year, then you’d be one of the 1.3 million Canadians who visited the Canada’s most-visited overseas country during the first quarter of 2026.
Following behind that is Dominican Republic with 441,000 visits and then Costa Rico with 193,000 visits.
Curious about the other numbers? You can check out the full report here.
