A full recovery in the tourism industry is unlikely until next year, Destination Canada predicts, even as the rebound comes quicker than expected ahead of a bigger bounceback forecasted for 2025.
In a new report, the Crown corporation said Tuesday the number of overnight leisure and business visits in the country will fall two percentage points short of 2019 levels by the end of this year. Projections show it beating pre-pandemic figures by a whisker in 2024.
Destination Canada, which promotes tourism across the country, said nominal spending in the sector will hit $109.5 billion in 2023, topping 2019 levels of roughly $105 billion. But the total for this year was fuelled partly by inflation, and would actually need to reach about $122 billion to match pre-pandemic spending in real terms, according to the Bank of Canada’s inflation calculator.
“Spend has been propped up of course by inflation,” Meaghan Ferrigno, Destination Canada’s chief data and analytics…