Here's another sign Canadians are pulling back on US travel

The number of Canadians staying at Airbnbs in the US dropped sharply last month, according to new data from AirDNA, a site that analyzes the short-term-rental market.

In March, there was a 12.1% decrease in nights booked by Canadian travelers compared with March 2024.

Canadians have been pulling back on travel to the US in response to growing tensions between the two countries over tariffs announced in January by President Donald Trump.

The short-term-rental market as a whole stayed steady in March, with average revenue per listing rising 1.3% compared with last year. Canadian travelers make up only a small portion of the overall US short-term-rental market, with just 2.6% of all bookings last year.

It's unclear whether the decline recorded in March will persist in April and beyond. Canadians booked US short-term rentals at slightly higher rates in January and February 2025 compared with the same months in 2024.

But Canadians hold a greater market share in certain destinations close to the US's northern border, including Buffalo, New York, and Bellingham, Washington, along with popular destinations for snowbirds, such as Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

"It may not affect the industry uniformly, but some places are going to see more impacts," an AirDNA economist, Bram Gallagher, told Business Insider.

Airbnb declined to comment.

Some Canadians are canceling trips to the US and expressing their patriotism

In February, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau encouraged Canadians to reconsider travel plans to the US and instead support domestic tourism.

It seems some Canadians have heeded his call.

The number of Canadians driving to the US in February fell 23% compared with the previous year, according to Statistics Canada data. In March, the travel firm OAG said bookings on flights to the US from Canada had dropped more than 70% year over year for April through September.

An Airbnb host in Palm Springs, California, told Business Insider in March that a longtime, regular Canadian guest had abruptly left his California vacation that month and canceled a coming $7,000 reservation.

"I'm having real trouble sleeping here right now. I'm cutting my stay short and am going home to Canada," the guest wrote in an email to the host, Robert Carlson.

Carlson said he was worried that a Canadian couple with a $17,000 reservation later in the year might follow suit.

The US Travel Association estimated that a 10% decrease in Canadian travel could result in 14,000 job losses and $2.1 billion in lost spending in 2025.

Some Canadians, meanwhile, are feeling a sense of strong sense of national pride. A Toronto consultant, Dylan Lobo, told Business Insider there had been a massive spike in traffic on his website, Made in CA, an online directory of Canadian-made goods.

Since January, he said, there had been days when site traffic tripled overnight. The biggest surge came on February 1, when Trump imposed 25% tariffs on most Canadian goods, and traffic reached 100,000-plus visitors, he said. BI couldn't independently verify Made in CA's readership.

"There's a lot of patriotism right now in this country," Lobo said.

Gallagher, of AirDNA, suggested that worried Airbnb hosts in the US could promote themselves as sympathetic to Canadian travelers.

"It could turn into something you market around, expressing solidarity for Canadian visitors," he said.