The tourism department in Minot, N.D. is reporting a roughly 20 per cent decrease in Canadian tourism at the end of the year that was branded by “elbows up” messaging and anti-United States rhetoric.

Minot definitely saw impacts to tourism compared to a normal year, said Visit Minot executive director Stephanie Schoenrock. The impacts are seen through a variety of data, including border crossings, web traffic, visitation, hotel data and some cellphone metrics that the team tracks.

“It’s probably about what I would have expected,” Schoenrock told the Sun recently. “I would have expected somewhere between a 20 and 30 per cent reduction.”

The tourism director said there is a major reason that Minot was expected to be resilient this year. The city, which is southwest of Brandon, has decades

See Full Page