Driving resilience by building on opportunities
Destination Canada’s Outlook Report is a dynamic, online visualization of the projected growth of tourism spending and visitation. It is designed for tourism industry stakeholders and Canadians who want to understand the future growth trajectory of Canada's tourism industry.
Created in collaboration with Tourism Economics, the outlook draw insights from a variety of respected sources, including Statistics Canada, Tourism HR Canada, the Conference Board of Canada, the Bank of Canada, International Air Transport Association (IATA), UN Tourism, Skift Research and more. Destination Canada's Tourism Outlook model forecasts future tourism visitation and spending driven by domestic and international travel.
Challenges and risks to tourism
Several forms of economic, political, and geopolitical instability are impacting international travel and its outlook.
Our industry must anticipate disruptions and identify opportunities going forward. This Tourism Outlook accounts for several factors impacting tourism flows. Air connectivity from China to Canada is hampered by the Russia-Ukraine war, and travel is further limited by the lack of approved destination status (ADS) with China. Climate change is driving seasonal shifts in bookings.
The ongoing disruptions to the global trading system are creating significant uncertainties and are resulting in changes to travel patterns. The Destination Canada Tourism Outlook 2025-2030 is based on conditions that prevailed in Fall 2024 and accordingly serves as a baseline against which to measure changes in travel patterns as conditions evolve.
Destination Canada’s Tourism Outlook 2025-2030 projects total visitor spending, domestic overnight trips, and overnight trips from the U.S. and key overseas markets. The report presents two potential futures:
- Transformation, which aims on transforming tourism in Canada to realize its full potential
- Continuation, which is based on staying on the current course and risking a loss of demand due to constraints limiting tourism growth.
Transforming tourism
In this scenario, tourism evolves new growth pathways by using excess capacity and by promoting seasonal and geographic dispersion. In the transformation scenario, tourism in Canada is forecasted to grow faster than the overall Canadian economy, delivering opportunities for entrepreneurship and employment in communities in every province and territory.
We are on track to achieve our bold ambitions for 2030, and potentially exceed them. Tourism spending reached $129.6 billion in 2024, and is projected to reach $160 billion by 2029, a full year earlier than forecasted in our Fall 2023 Tourism Outlook.
As the industry evolves to realize its full potential, tourism revenue will grow at a compound annual rate of 4.7% from 2024 to 2030, outpacing economic growth projected to expand at a nominal rate of 3.9%. Tourism presents an unprecedented economic opportunity.
Staying the current course
In this scenario, while our forecast is built on opportunity, it is tempered by capacity constraints, which limit the industry's potential. These constraints include limited seasonal availability of accommodation, air capacity, as well as labour availability and productivity.
With supply constraints limiting capacity in our industry, tourism revenue is forecasted to reach $150 billion in 2030.
The outcome of constrained growth is projected to result in a compound annual growth rate of 2.5% between 2024 to 2030.
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