The Meteoric Fall of Canada From World Tourism Rankings
Photo Credit: Horse-back riding during fall in New Brunswick, Canada. Flickr / New Brunswick Tourism
Skift Take
Being the nice guy in the neighborhood means nothing if you’re invisible. Canada needs to get out of its funk, get more funky and become more exciting for a whole new generation of travelers coming out of Asia and Latin America.
Canada was once the second most visited country in the world, only behind Italy, back when all planes crossing the Atlantic had to stop in Newfoundland. But that ended in the 1970s, and today, as the world is going through a travel boom and more than a billion travelers crossed national boundaries around the planet last year, Canada has slipped to the 18th spot, trailing countries such as Ukraine and Saudi Arabia.
And lest you think that it couldn’t go worse from there, the number of international travelers to Canada has dropped 20 percent since 2000. How bad is it? Even the declining guidebook industry began cutting Canada titles in the mid 2000s.
A dive into the reasons of this decline were outlined in recent res
