Photo: Kylie Anderson / Unsplash
For the first time on record, Canadian cities hold more top-ten positions than America in the ranking of busiest international air routes into Mexico. According to data released by Mexico’s Federal Civil Aviation Agency (AFAC), five of the ten busiest international corridors now connect Canadian airports with Mexican destinations, with the Torontoto Cancún route topping the list as the single busiest international flight into the country.
The Toronto to Cancún route grew 26.1% in 2025 to surpass 1.3 million passengers, while the Montreal connection climbed 24%, carrying more than 737,000 travelers. Those are the largest year-over-year increases since records began. Meanwhile, six of the ten busiest U.S. routes to Cancún lost passengers: Chicago dropped 11.7%, Dallas fell 4.5%, New York slipped roughly 4%, and Atlanta declined 2%.
Overall, Mexico welcomed just over 2.8 million Canadian visitors in 2025, an 11% increase over the previous year, according to Mexico’s Ministry of Tourism. Of that total, 1.6 million arrived through Quintana Roo, accounting for 13.6% of all international arrivals to the state. The United States remains the overall leader by volume, with 13.7 million passengers (5.29 million to Cancún alone), followed by Canada, the United Kingdom, Colombia, and Argentina.
More Air Routes to Mexico Result of Boycotts of USA
The shift didn’t happen by accident. A boycott of U.S. travel that began in early 2025, triggered by President Donald Trump’s repeated suggestions that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state, has shown no signs of slowing down. An Abacus Data poll in March 2025 found that 62% of Canadians planned to avoid traveling to the U.S. for the following year. By late 2025, Flight Centre Canada reported that bookings to U.S. destinations were down 40% year over year, with general manager Anita Emilio telling CTV News the decline was expected to continue through 2026.
Airlines wasted no time redirecting capacity. According to aviation data from PAX News, Canada’s four largest carriers, Air Canada, WestJet, Porter Airlines, and Air Transat, collectively boosted capacity to Latin America by approximately 36% for the 2025-2026 winter season while trimming more than 1,500 flights to the United States. WestJet and Air Canada together now control roughly 70% of the Canada-Mexico market. New seasonal routes, including WestJet’s direct Calgary to Cozumel service and a Winnipeg to Cancún connection, launched in late 2025, with Porter introducing its first-ever Caribbean flights from Toronto, Hamilton, and Ottawa.
Francisco Madrid, director of STARC (a Mexican tourism research body), put the shift in perspective: for the first time in history, the busiest international air routes into Mexico are not those connecting U.S. cities, but those linking Canadian ones.
Betting on Canada
Tourism officials in the region are treating this as an opportunity that demands a deliberate response. Andrés Martínez Reynoso, director of the Quintana Roo Tourism Promotion Council (CPTQ), confirmed plans to double promotional spending in Canada for 2026. The council is also working to increase flight frequency from the 19 Canadian cities already connected to Cancún, at a time when 17 new air routes into Cancún International Airport are being added, including five from Canada and the first ever non-stop from Dublin via Aer Lingus.
But the boom comes with a caveat. Seven out of every ten international tourists arriving in Mexico still come from North America. The decline of South American and European markets in the 2025 rankings, with countries like Brazil and Peru both losing ground, underlines the risk of relying too heavily on a single region. The CPTQ says diversification toward those markets is now part of its strategy, alongside the Canadian push.
For expats living along the Riviera Maya and in Cancún, the influx is already visible. More Canadian voices at airport arrivals, more WestJet and Air Canada liveries on the tarmac at CUN, and a growing snowbird population choosing Mexico over Florida and Arizona.
Whether the trend holds will depend in part on the political temperature between Ottawa and Washington, but for now, Canada has quite literally taken the top spot on the departure board.