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May 06, 2022TOURISM ACTIVITY TRACKER, FEBRUARY 2022 Statistics Canada's "Canadian Tourism Activity Tracker" illustrates the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on tourism activity. The data compares the latest reference period (February 2022) and the same period in 2019, prior to the pandemic. This provides a snapshot of how tourism activity has changed, including air travel, surface travel, hotels/accommodations, spending and trip duration. Tourism activity is monitored for both domestic travellers (those travelling within Canada, including within province more than 40 km from home) as well as inbound travellers from international sources. Overall tourism is estimated as a weighted average of domestic and inbound tourism activities.
With the emergence of the Omicron variant in December, the federal government advised against all non-essential travel outside of the country and required a negative PCR test for all travellers entering Canada. Many provinces delayed re-opening plans. After several months of recovery, the improvement in tourism activity reversed across the country. As restrictions started to ease in February, the tourism activity tracker started to converge again to its rising trend.
In February 2022, Nova Scotia's tourism activity was 47.4% below February 2019 levels. Domestic tourism activity was 38.7% below February 2019 levels. International inbound tourism activity in Nova Scotia was 77.9% below February 2019 levels. Nova Scotia reported the largest declines in both international and domestic tourism activities as well as the second largest declines in overall tourism activity.
Overall tourism activity in Canada was down 37.2% compared to February 2019. Saskatchewan (-27.2%) and Newfoundland and Labrador (-31.7%) report the least declines while Prince Edward Island (-48.1%) and Nova Scotia report the largest declines.
With travel and activity restrictions at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, tourism activity fell dramatically in all provinces. Activity partially recovered in the summer and fall of 2020, as domestic tourism started to grow again (international inbound tourism remained well below 2019 levels). Additional restrictions and travel limitations in the spring of 2021 reduced tourism activity again, particularly domestic tourism. As restrictions were eased in the summer of 2021, there was a sharp rebound in tourism activity across all provinces, driven primarily by domestic tourism. Tourism activity had been recovering at a slower pace since the summer of 2021 to December. With the emergence of the Omicron variant and reinstatement of restrictions, tourism activity fell in January 2022.
The Omicron-related declines of January started to reverse (except in Prince Edward Island) as restrictions began to ease in February. However, there was less evidence of recovery in international inbound tourism activities in February.
Source: Statistics Canada. Table 24-10-0049-01 Canadian Tourism Activity Tracker and Grouped Data Sources, Canadian Tourism Activity Tracker
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