After President Donald Trump threatened to make Canada the 51st state last year, a lot of Canadians started boycotting U.S. products and stopped traveling to this country. Canadian travel to the U.S. fell by 25% last year, according to Canada’s official statistics agency.
This year, however, there are signs that the travel boycott may be softening a bit. Border crossings rose year-over-year in April, May, and June. Some businesses that rely on Canadian tourism are noticing the trend and trying to entice more visitors to come south.
In northeastern Vermont, Burke Mountain, a ski resort about an hour from the border with the French-speaking province of Quebec, turns into a mountain bike park in the summer. You can put your bike on the chairlift, ride down trails specifically built for bikes, and connect to a 130-mile network of mountain bike terrain known as Kingdom Trails.
“So you can hop on the chairlift and ride right back into Kingdom Trails, without the expense on your legs,” explained Alex McAndrew, Burke Mountain’s summer operations director.
Burke is less than three hours from the Montreal metro area and its 4.5 million residents. Before last year, the mountain bike park was really popular with Canadians; McAndrew said they made up about 40% of its summer visitors. Then, President Trump started threatening to annex their country.
“We went from hearing a lot of French in our lift lines, seeing a lot of French Canadian plates and visitors to almost none,” he said.
But this summer, some of those Quebec plates are back in Burke’s parking lot.
“I’ve had to use my French a lot more, which is really enjoyable,” McAndrew said. “It’s a muscle I haven’t exercised as much lately, and now it’s really coming back.”
That’s, perhaps, thanks in part to some generous discounts from the resort and other area businesses this summer: Local inns, a meat market, a restaurant, and a cannabis dispensary all offered deals to Canadians for most of July and early August. Burke gave Canadians 20% off hotel rooms, a deal McAndrew said they’ll continue for the foreseeable future.
Burke Mountain, Kingdom Trails, and other local businesses offered discounts to Canadians for most of July and early August, including an offer to pay U.S. prices in Canadian dollars — amounting to a nearly 30% discount.
Henry Epp/Marketplace
Both Burke and the Kingdom Trails network offered an even more generous discount on memberships and lift tickets: accepting the Canadian dollar at par.
One Canadian dollar is worth just over 70 cents in the U.S, so paying a U.S. price in Canadian dollars works out to about a 30% discount.
“The only thing that we can do, and the most important thing, is to be welcoming to our Canadian members and riders,” said Ilan Weitzen, Kingdom Trails’ office manager.
That welcome appears to have helped. Canadians fell from 40% of Kingdom Trails’ ridership to about 10% last year. During the at-par promotion, however, that rose to 17%, and even higher on weekends, Weitzen said.
The discount wasn’t the deciding factor for some Canadian visitors, though. Sébastien Ouellet of Montreal said he got the at-par deal while visiting Kingdom Trails, but he didn’t want it.
“I want to spend my fair share of money,” he said.
The real reasons he regularly visits the region: “The people, and the charm of the New England, in general.”
Not far away, there’s another anecdotal sign that more Canadians may head south this coming winter. Jay Peak, another ski resort in the area, owns a hockey arena. It hosts youth hockey tournaments with teams from both sides of the border each winter.
“Last year we only had four Canadian teams here,” said Jay Peak’s general manager Steve Wright. “Usually, it’s over 100.”
For this coming winter, 30 Canadian teams have signed up so far, he said. That has Wright feeling optimistic that he’ll soon be seeing more bookings from Canadian skiers too.
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