Passenger volumes on U.S. flights remain strong at Vancouver International Airport
Industry forecasts had predicted that air passenger volumes on Canada-U.S. routes would really fall off starting in Summer 2025, based on earlier trends of a decreasing number of bookings later in the year and the expectation that Canadian travellers were unlikely to impulsively cancel near-term trips already planned months in advance and paid for.
But this has not been apparent at Vancouver International Airport (YVR), which has only seen a relatively minor decrease for its U.S. transborder market so far.
“It is a dip, but it’s certainly not the dip that some folks were projecting at one point,” Russell Atkinson, the Director of Air Service Development for the Vancouver Airport Authority, told Daily Hive Urbanized in an interview this week.
YVR handled 686,000 passengers on its U.S. routes in July 2025, a modest 2.2 per cent dip from July 2024.
Even so, July 2025 was the airport’s third-busiest month ever for U.S. traffic — trailing only the 702,000 passengers recorded in July 2024 and the 700,000 in August 2024. This milestone reflects the exceptionally strong rebound in YVR’s domestic and U.S. transborder markets following the pandemic, which recovered far more quickly than its non-U.S. international markets.
In the first seven months of 2025, YVR recorded relatively slight year-over-year declines in U.S. passenger traffic each month. The cumulative drop was relatively modest — down just 5.5 per cent over this seven-month period compared with the same period in 2024, from 3.906 million to 3.693 million passengers.
Atkinson noted that while the number of Canadians travelling south has seen a clear decrease, much of this has been offset by very strong numbers of Americans travelling north to Vancouver — attracted by the strong seasonal tourism fundamentals of the city, including cruise ships and major events and conferences, such as the inaugural Web Summit Vancouver, SIGGRAPH, and the Alcoholics Anonymous International Convention.
“We are still seeing a lot of Americans coming up, and it’s on the backs of a very strong cruise season in Vancouver and on the backs of a summer with a lot of major events in the city. So we think about things like the big tech summit that was held here earlier this summer,” he said.
Another factor driving these numbers is that YVR has really solidified its Trans-Pacific hub standing in North America — a key gateway for connections to Asia and Australia.
Since the pandemic, YVR expanded its already-strong Asia-Pacific network with new direct, non-stop services to Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, Manila, and Dubai. While its direct connections and overall capacity to Mainland China have not yet fully recovered, YVR remains one of the largest hubs in North America for direct, non-stop flights to Mainland China — and will see two more routes added by the end of this month.
“We have very strong sixth-freedom traffic flows, so passengers that are connecting from Asia Pacific to the United States, or vice versa, are connecting to Vancouver on our services,” continued Atkinson.
The U.S. transborder market was the only segment to record a year-over-year decline at YVR in July 2025 and over the first seven months of the year. By contrast, Asia-Pacific and Europe posted very strong growth, while domestic traffic saw more modest gains. Even with the dip, U.S. transborder remains YVR’s second-largest market after domestic.
Buoyed by an exceptional summer, YVR is now on pace to surpass both its second-best year of 2024 and its all-time record of 26.38 million passengers set in 2019, potentially making 2025 the airport’s busiest year ever.
Some of these U.S. traffic trends are also reflected on the Canada-U.S. land border crossing by vehicle and train.
Statistics Canada reported that for the month of July 2025, about 1.8 million U.S. residents drove north into Canada, slightly outpacing the 1.7 million Canadians who returned by car from trips south of the border. Historically, more Canadians cross this border than Americans.
For American travellers across the land border, the drop was relatively mild — a seven per cent decrease in July 2025 compared with the same month in 2024, marking the sixth straight month of declines. Canadian vehicles, however, saw a much steeper slide: return trips from the U.S. plunged nearly 37 per cent from last July, the seventh month in a row of year-over-year decreases.
A separate Statistics Canada report released earlier this summer noted that Canadian visits to the U.S. reached 39 million in 2024, accounting for three-quarters of all international trips by Canadians that year. But more recent travel data suggests a shift in sentiment in early 2025, with fewer Canadians opting to head south.
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