Only China bucks gloomy trend in another tough month, says latest CTC Tourism Snapshot.

Kapow! Auto travel from the US declines. Biff! Overnight markets suffer more bad news. Crunch! Canadian overnight travel takes a tumble. Only Batman and Robin seem to take more body blows than the global tourism industry in 2009. Yet China, with a 12% jump in visitor numbers, shows that bad figures can be beaten.

Those are the findings in the latest Tourism Snapshot for August 2009, just published by the Canadian Tourism Commission’s (CTC) Research department. The five-page report looks closely at travel trends and statistics up to Aug. 31 in CTC’s—and its partners’—key markets around the world.

But please, don’t shoot the messenger; here are some of the findings:

• Baby, you can’t drive my car was the watchword for automobile travel from the US in August 2009. Just over 1.1 million journeys to Canada represented a 15% year-on-year drop.
• However, New Brunswick (10%) and Saskatchewan (4%) had an uptick in US visitor numbers on August 2008.
• Ay, caramba! The new visa requirements and ongoing H1N1 flu virus woes meant only 14,200 overnight trips from Mexico to Canada in August 2009, a precipitous drop of 55%.
• In total, trips from Mexico between January and August 2009 tumbled 29% over the same period in 2008.
• International travellers rested their heads for 2.3 million overnight stays in Canada, a 13% decline on August 2008.
• Canadians thought there was no place like home: there were only 2.4 million overnighters to the US, down 6% on the same period last year. Year-to-date, there has been an 8% decrease (12.5 million trips).
• China was the only key CTC market to enter September with a smile: visits to Canada rose 12% over August 2008.
• All other CTC key markets took some nasty falls. South Korea (-32%), Japan (-29%) and Australia (-23%) took the lion’s share of declines.
• Consumer confidence kept on the high road in Canada for the sixth successive month. The Index of Consumer Confidence, released by The Conference Board of Canada, rose 5.5 points to 88.4.
• The US was in a happier frame of mind, too. The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index took a tonic to surge back to 54.1.