How many tourists visited Toronto last year? Report finds uptick, but city not yet back to pre-pandemic levels

The city saw 8.95 million visitors in 2023, just shy of the 9.6 million in 2019 but well above the 6.5 million in 2022.

For a sector slammed hard by the pandemic, the recovery so far is encouraging, said Andrew Weir, the executive vice president of Destination Toronto.

“Overall, the visitor economy of Toronto is clearly regaining momentum, but it’s not all the way back,” he said. 

Toronto is unique in that it has historically welcomed a very diverse mix of travellers, Weir said, adding that as a destination the city was never just business or pleasure, but a mix of both. Many of the visitors themselves came from other provinces but also from the U.S and overseas.

But when everyone discovered hiking and small towns during the pandemic, the city struggled. 

“What do we sell here in Toronto? We sell a lot of people together in the same place, at the same time, doing really exciting things, and 98 years out of 100 that’s a great thing to sell,” Weir said. “But for those two years, it’s not what people wanted and so we saw a real challenge in urban travel.”

Now, almost four years after the emergence of COVID, not everyone is flocking back equally. In particular, while the domestic market has come roaring back, particularly among leisure travellers and those eager to go on vacation after several years of staying home, those coming for business or from overseas haven’t bounced back as quickly, Weir said.

This is a challenge for businesses because different types of travellers tend to require different services. Domestic travellers are critical to the industry, especially during the pandemic when they kept many businesses going, Weir said. But they generally take shorter trips and are more likely to stay with friends or family instead of booking a hotel.

To that end, despite an increase in overall spending, demand for rooms in the accommodation sector remains down 19 per cent, according to Destination Toronto.

While some business travel, for example, may never come back — Zoom having likely killed some in-person meetings for good — there are still major opportunities when it comes to hosting major conferences and meetings, Weir said. Playing host to these gatherings also has economic knock on effects in terms of the general vibrancy of the downtown core, not to mention recruiting talent and business travellers who choose to return on vacation.

The challenge right now is that many of these major academic or business conferences are planned four to five years in advance, and so the city is currently enduring a lag in events because of the bookings that didn’t happen during the pandemic, he said. 

International travel is picking up again but continues to lag, though that’s true for much of the world, said Frédéric Dimanche, director of the Ted Rogers School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Toronto Metropolitan.

“It takes time to recover. Especially for air transportation, the airlines don’t have as many planes in the air as we used to have,” Dimanche said.

“And we’ve documented in Canada for the past couple of years the so-called labour gap,” he added, meaning that many tourism operators have struggled to hire back enough staff after shedding staff during the pandemic. 

According to the UN World Tourism Organization, tourist arrivals across the world hit 88 per cent of pre-pandemic levels last year, with the organization predicting that “remaining pent-up demand, increased air connectivity, and a stronger recovery of Asian markets” to drive a full recovery next year.

But in Toronto, international travel was at just 75 per cent of pre-pandemic levels last year, thanks to some specific challenges faced by the city and Canada at large, according to the Destination Toronto report. Notably, there has been a major decline in travellers from China, which prior to the pandemic had been Toronto’s largest overseas market.

While visitor numbers from Mexico are up and the U.K. and Germany approached three quarters of their former numbers, visitors from China are at just 24 per cent. 

Early on in the pandemic, China restricted many people from leaving the country but even as those precautions ease, political tensions between Beijing and Canada continue to affect willingness to travel here, Dimanche said.

Last August, the Chinese government released it’s latest list of countries approved as international travel destinations for tour groups and package travel. Canada was noticeably absent; a reaction, according to news reports, to Canadian concern over alleged political interference.

Of course, there’s the fact that travel, like many things, emerged from the pandemic slightly changed. After several years of taking that meeting from the cottage, Dimanche says that people continue to mix business and leisure.

But the emerging push for “bleisure,” could be a mixed blessing for the city, as people increasingly view smaller towns or vacation spots as viable places to get work done.

According to Destination Canada’s second quarterly report from last year, hotel occupancy rates nationwide are now slightly outpacing pre-pandemic levels, but average occupancy in small towns is exceeding urban centres. 

As well, after years of pandemic restrictions, many tourism operators — many of whom are small businesses — are still feeling battered, Dimanche added, particularly the ones who are now trying to pay back the Canada Emergency Business Account, or CEBA, loans.