by Jen Mallia
Last updated: 2:15 PM ET, Thu March 27, 2025
If you’ve felt like summer bookings to the U.S. have been lighter than they were last year, you are right. Given all the reports of Canadians avoiding the U.S. for myriad reasons, the slump isn’t exactly a surprise. What may be surprising though, is just how far bookings have fallen off; leading the aviation data analysts at OAG to label it a “collapse.”
From April to September of 2025, transborder bookings are down more than 70% each month compared to 2024.
Despite the striking decline in demand, as it stands, airlines have only cut 320,000 seats on flights between the U.S. and Canada over the coming months (from April to October). That’s an amount that equals between 1.6 percent and 3.5 percent lower, year over year, depending on the month.
It is difficult for airlines to reschedule their summer schedules on short notice, as alternate slots in other destinations are already booked up.
While WestJet is pivoting to more European flights (adding 114 transatlantic flights for the summer,) OAG posits that Air Canada may not be able to find slots at major European airports to reassign their planes to at this date, and that’s why they haven’t followed suit.
OAG also points out that “Air Canada typically has larger proportions of connecting traffic across its network, much of which connects at a US hub to one of its Star Alliance partners, making it more difficult to manage when flights are cancelled.”
The report from OAG doesn’t list if the public has direct their bookings to non-American destinations in corresponding numbers, but other data show that domestic travel is experiencing a bump. See Canadians Choose Local for more.
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