Toronto tourism brought record $8.8 billion to the city in 2024, report suggests. Was Taylor Swift behind the boom?

Taylor Swift performs during the opening show of the Toronto dates of The Eras Tour on Thursday, November 14, 2024. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

From Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour to the NHL All-Star Game, 2024 was a big year for tourism in Toronto and a new report shows visitor spending reached levels never before seen in the city.

In a new report released Monday, Destination Toronto said nine million overnight tourists – the most since the COVID-19 pandemic – spent a record $8.8 billion last year.

The non-profit organization said domestic tourism has all but returned to pre-pandemic levels, and travel from international markets is “progressing steadily and driving disproportionate value.”

“What we continue to see now is this diversification of our business. You know, Toronto has always had a very diverse visitor economy, we have business travellers, we have leisure travellers, we have big conventions, we have people that come from Canada, from the U.S., from overseas markets,” Destination Toronto president and CEO Andrew Weir told CP24 Monday morning. The report notes that international travellers tend to stay in the city longer and spend more than domestic visitors.

“We’re starting to get back to that level of balance. When we came out of the pandemic, it was much more of that domestic leisure travel, because no one else could come here. The borders were closed. So now we’re starting to see that return of all the different engines of the visitor economy that have to be firing and I think in 2025, we’ll see more of that.”

According to the data, the lion’s share of visitors to Toronto in 2024 were Canadian at 6.32 million people. International visitors, including those from the U.S. U.K., and China, accounted for 2.68 million.

Visitor arrivals and spending in Toronto have been increasing year-over-year since rolling COVID-19 lockdowns started back in 2020. Destination Toronto found that last year, the city saw 400,000 more visitors than 2023 – although that was still 600,000 tourists below the level seen in 2019.

The city’s comeback was bolstered by a number of major events that stopped in Toronto last year, including Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, which Destination Toronto previously estimated would generate a $282 million in economic impact, and the NHL All-Star Game.

Weir said those events could serve as a “dress rehearsal” for the big events Toronto is set to play host to in the coming years, specifically when the FIFA World Cup stops in the city in 2026.