Small inns, hotels bear the burden of slouching Canadian tourism

The Nutmeg Inn, in Meredith, saw a 15% dip in revenue from 2024 to 2025. It was the first year since owners Karen and Kevin LaSella purchased the bed and breakfast that they saw revenue dip, the couple said; the decline was driven almost entirely by a drop in international, particularly Canadian, visitors. (Photo by Molly Rains/New Hampshire Bulletin)

Meredith’s Nutmeg Inn used to be a melting pot.

“The world’s a very small place when you own an inn,” said Kevin LaSella, who since 2021 has run the bed and breakfast alongside his wife, Karen.

During the busy summer and fall seasons, the LaSellas begin their days at 6 a.m., preparing breakfast at a pair of side-by-side stoves in the kitchen of the historic building. Guests convene over the food in the house’s cozy, wallpapered rooms, where in recent years the innkeepers said they’ve been proud to see conversations bridging national borders.

Consistently throughout the couple’s first four years owning the bed and breakfast, as much as a third of the Nutmeg Inn’s guests have typically hailed from abroad, said Kevin LaSella. The largest group among those international visitors were Canadian. At certain times, like Laconia’s annual Bike Week, the proportion of Canadian lodgers in the Nutmeg’s guest rooms grew to nearly half. 

Then, last year, that abruptly changed. During the summer of 2025, the LaSellas say they welcomed only one Canadian couple to the inn all season long. 

This year, bookings from up North are looking quieter, too. By this time, said Kevin LaSella, reservations from Canadian travelers have typically begun to trickle in — but so far, next summer’s numbers are on par with what the Nutmeg Inn saw in 2025. LaSella is worried it’s a sign that President Donald Trump’s fraught relationship with Canada and other countries, characterized by fluctuating tariffs and volatile rhetoric, will jeopardize the future of small hospitality businesses throughout the state.

“We can weather the storm of last year, so to speak,” he said. “But when you’re getting hit on both sides, you’re getting hit because of the geopolitical rhetoric and it hits your revenue by 15%, and then on the expense side of the business you get squeezed. … That’s a progressively less profitable, or potentially not profitable at all, business.”

A precipitous drop

In August, Taylor Caswell, who at the time was serving as commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Business and Economic Affairs, estimated that Canadian tourism to New Hampshire was down 30% from the year before. By December, that number had remained consistent, according to Michele Cota, director of Discover New England, a marketing organization formed by the six New England state tourism offices; like the border states of Vermont and Maine, New Hampshire was facing a sharper decline in visitation than other states in the region, she said.

But not all parts of the state’s hospitality industry, and not all areas, have been affected equally. Vacation spots that classically draw large numbers of Canadian tourists, like the Seacoast and White Mountains regions, have felt the impact most.

From 2024 to 2025, Canadian-made bookings at New Hampshire state park campsites were “way down,” Department of Natural and Cultural Resources spokesperson Gregory Keeler said in an email. In 2024, about 3,400 camping reservations came in from Canada; in 2025, that number dropped by 64% to just over 1,200.

And at Hampton Beach, “the whole community was affected,” said Shahin Pervaiz, who has owned the Emerald Isle Inn, a hotel about a mile from the beach, for 22 years. For much of that time, Canadian visitors were about half of the 25-room inn’s clientele, Pervaiz said. This summer, the Emerald Isle welcomed almost no Canadian visitors. 

This was true across the community, according to Pervaiz, who said some of her colleagues in the local hospitality scene were struggling to pay their bills this winter. “The business, and everything, is not the way it was anymore,” Pervaiz said.

The decline in Canadian visitation resulted in a 15% revenue drop at the Nutmeg Inn year-over-year from 2024 to 2025, said Kevin LaSella. That was compounded by volatile costs that LaSella connected to tariffs imposed by the presidential administration. One day, when he went to purchase a freezer full of coffee for breakfast service, LaSella saw that the price had grown by about one-third. At first, he thought the coffee had been mislabeled.

“Now I’m spending that much more for something that we can’t do without,” LaSella said.

National policies influence personal decisions

Tourism is “critical, absolutely fundamental” to New Hampshire’s broader economy, said Caswell, who resigned from the Department of Business and Economic Affairs in October. He had led the department for eight years, but last year the Executive Council declined to advance his nomination for another term.

Hospitality, he said in a Feb. 4 interview, is also a very personal industry that hinges on vacationers’ personal choices about where to spend their free time. This makes it susceptible to factors like the ideological friction between the U.S. and Canadian administrations.

More from this section

New Hampshire's Median Rent Is Up to $2,143, 9th Highest in the U.S.

Since taking office for his second term in January 2025, Trump has made repeated references to annexing Canada, calling it the “51st state.” He has also imposed significant new and fluctuating tariffs on top imports from Canada and others among the United States’ trading partners. 

Caswell, who accompanied New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte on a trade mission to Canada in September, said a major goal of that trip had been to communicate New Hampshire’s continued desire to maintain a mutually beneficial trade relationship with its northern neighbor despite volatile politics at the national level. On that trip, he said, he heard from Canadians that Trump’s comments had damaged their view of the nation as a whole.

“I think the thing we heard most was this reference to the ‘51st state’ kind of thing. That really, understandably, hurt a lot of people,” he said. “… It’s going to take a while to earn that trust back.”

The LaSellas said they heard similar concerns from their British relatives and few remaining international guests.

“It’s because of the geopolitical stuff, the fear factor of issues at the border with visas, how they might be treated, and then just being offended, flat out, by all of the rhetoric going on,” Kevin LaSella said.

Visitation trends were not consistent across the whole state – and in some cases where Canadian visits lessened, domestic tourism increased, said state Sen. Dan Innis, a Republican from Bradford who is also a professor of marketing and hospitality management at the University of New Hampshire.

“I think we did have a blip. There’s no question about that,” said Innis, who has touted his political alignment with Trump. But there were more factors at play, he said, than just the administration’s rhetoric.

Innis pointed to the currency exchange rate and “general economy” in Canada as other possible explanations for the decline. Pervaiz also said that changing consumer habits, like the rise of AirBNB and similar short-term rental sites, have further drained the customer bases of traditional lodgings in some touristy areas. 

“I think it’s difficult to say, oh, yeah, this is due to Trump’s rhetoric,” Innis said. “I mean, that’s hard to prove. Does it have some impact? Yeah, for a few travelers. Is it widespread? I’m not sure it is,” he said.

Innis also said the gap was “backfilled” with increasing domestic tourism, pointing to consistent year-over-year rooms and meals tax revenue. And not all hospitality businesses saw declines in bookings, he noted.

Indeed, turning to domestic tourism is an important coping mechanism when international visitation dips, said Caswell. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department of Business and Economic Affairs turned to southern New England, and even southern New Hampshire, to advertise tourist attractions in northern portions of the state, he said. While Caswell was working at the BEA this summer, the department had been repeating that effort to attempt to fill the gap left by declining Canadian visitation, he said.

But that isn’t a solution for all businesses, said Pervaiz and the LaSellas.

International visitors spend more money in a region, and tend to stay for longer, Kevin LaSella said. And though Hampton Beach has remained busy with beachgoers from within the New England area, those travelers aren’t in need of overnight accommodations, leaving the Emerald Isle Inn and its neighbors emptier than usual, Pervaiz said.

Looking ahead

“The damage of the situation is going to be one that’s going to be with us for a while,” said Caswell. Once travelers’ routines are disrupted, business may be lost for some time.

And for innkeepers, the issue has become fraught, both because of its impacts on their livelihoods and the political weight of the conversation.

“Nobody even sees how much damage is being done to the industry, and they don’t care. And some people don’t believe you,” said LaSella, who described himself as “a lifelong Republican.” What the LaSellas have seen at their own small business is sometimes difficult to talk about, even among friends and family, he said. 

“A number of individuals actually said, ‘We don’t need [international tourists] anyway,’” he said. “I’m like, you may not, but we like them, and they’re good for our business.”

Pervaiz said the many issues that Hampton Beach was facing wouldn’t be remedied overnight. The decline in international visits compounded many factors, she said, that have altered the community. 

“The beach is going to be there. There’s people who are going to come, but the business is not booming like it used to,” she said.