A major airline retains hope for a rebound in US-Canada travel | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

While President Donald Trump has stopped calling Canada “the 51st state” and its head of state its “governor,” Canadian travel into the U.S. remains at previously unseen lows as many Canadians continue to put off travel south of the border.

The monthly Statistics Canada report for September 2025 shows the number of Canadians returning home from trips to the U.S. was down 27% compared to the previous year. At the same time, airlines such as Air Canada and WestJet canceled flights to secondary U.S. cities such as Washington DC, Houston and Austin from Montreal and Calgary earlier in the year amid lower demand.

“If we can derisk this a little bit and move and be a bit proactive and move capacity into other sectors [where] we see strength, I think that’s the right move right now in this context,” Mark Galardo, Air Canada ACDVF’s executive vice president of revenue and network planning, told investors at a March 2025 earnings call.

Air Canada hopes to bring US flights back to summer 2024 levels: will it work?

Even so, some signs of an expected turnaround have started to emerge. Earlier this year, American Airlines cemented a codeshare partnership with Toronto-based Porter Airlines.

This means that American Airlines travelers to earn loyalty points on flights purchased through Porter Airlines and connect to the larger network of smaller Canadian cities such as Edmonton, Thunder Bay, Deer Lake, Moncton, and Fort McMurray.

While Cirium data shows that flag carrier Air Canada’s seat count to the U.S. was down by 9.2% in the third quarter of 2025, the airline has previously made several hints that it hopes to bring capacity back to summer 2024 levels by next year.

Last September, the airline announced flights to San Antonio from Toronto International Airport (YYZ) and routes between Montreal and Cleveland and Columbus in Ohio all set to run between May and October of 2026.

Toronto Harbour is a picturesque area with numerous waterfront restaurants and high-end hotels.

Image source&colon; Shutterstock

“It’s a short-term blip”: aviation expert on Air Canada

“I think what Air Canada has decided in its analysis of the marketplace is that it’s a short-term blip,” John Gradek, an aviation management professor at McGill University, told Travel Weekly. “They are looking at this reduction in demand holding through maybe the beginning of November when the snow starts to fly and Canadians want to get away from winter.”

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While predictions about any drop in travel being a temporary ebb have so far failed to pan out, the new routes spell optimism for the travel industry that has been hit particularly hard in cities like Las Vegas.

Amid a dropoff in Canadian travel, there has also been an uptick in liberal Americans traveling to Canada to both explore and support the country that at the start of the year Trump tried to target with threats and tariffs.

In July 2025, the number of return car trips back from the U.S. to Canada was higher than the other way around for the first time in history. Airlines have, in turn, observed a similar uptick in the number of Americans flying into Canadian cities for tourism.