By Ed Offley
It was not the kind of email that a Panama City Beach property manager likes to receive.
When Rodney Lawrence turned on his office computer one day in late October, he found an email from Hans van Zandvoort, a Canadian resident and longtime winter visitor to the Beach with his wife, Liz.
“As much as we have enjoyed our trips to PCB and hospitality that you and your staff have shown us, unfortunately, we will not be returning this winter,” van Zandvoort wrote.
The reason: the Trump administration’s stricter entry requirements for Canadians planning to stay more than 30 days in the United States, including mandatory biometric data collection and a $30 per person entry fee.
Van Zandvoort bluntly said the couple’s decision not to return stemmed from “the current political climate requiring us to be fingerprinted and carrying U.S.-assigned documents.” He added, “Customs and Border staff … can be intimidating even though we give them no cause and a feeling that Canadian visitors are not valued has made us sadly come to this decision.”
As CEO of the property management firm Vacations Perfected, Lawrence said he has seen a significant drop in seasonal rentals by Canadians. The company manages 95 properties on Panama City Beach. “Last year we were 80 percent occupied, mostly Canadians,” Lawrence told PCB Life. “We’re actually at about 55 percent [occupied] this winter.”
In addition to the tighter entry procedures, Canadians have also become resentful over President Trump’s imposition of heavy tariffs ranging from 35 percent on general goods to 50 percent on steel and aluminum. The president’s call earlier this year for Canada to become America’s 51st state further spiked public anger north of the border.
A weakened Canadian dollar and rising rental costs in Florida are further exacerbating the situation.
Nevertheless, there appears to be no clear consensus in the travel industry over how serious the decline in Canadian tourists will be as the winter season gets underway.
Tourism analyst Edmond Thorne, writing at Medium.com, said Canadian tourists visiting Florida dropped 20 percent in the second quarter of 2025 compared to the previous year, falling from 800,000 to 640,000 visitors.
While the 3.3 million Canadians who visited Florida in 2024 represented only 2.3 percent of the 143.9 million total, Thorne pointed out that Snowbirds who come for an extended stay contribute to the local economy, rather than spending their money at a major entertainment complex such as Disney World.
Lawrence said the pain of fewer Snowbirds will fall on individual property owners who rely on them renting their places for two or three months to defray the costs of a mortgage, insurance and other expenses. “This will also negatively impact service workers ranging from unit cleaners to other local businesses,” he said.
Dan Rowe, president of the Bay County Tourist Development Council, offered a more optimistic view, noting that Panama City Beach is currently experiencing only a 10-percent decline in Canadian visitors. The economic impact will be mitigated by the fact that the great majority of Snowbirds coming here are Americans and not from Canada. A recent TDC analysis showed that in 2024, residents of Wisconsin, Michigan and Minnesota comprised 33 percent of winter visitor rentals at Panama City Beach. Ontario, Canada, ranked fourth at 8.4 percent.
The TDC has a longstanding program to directly engage with winter visitors who make recurring stays at the Beach, Rowe said. Barrie Ainslie, the TDC’s Director of Visitor Services, and communications director Sydney Clifton produce “Tidal Times,” a weekly e-newsletter sent out to a base of about 8,000 Snowbirds with several editions in the off-season and then as a weekly newsletter beginning each January.
Rowe said he is confident that Canadian visitation at the Beach will continue. “People put politics aside. There are people who will continue to travel here,” he said. “These people don’t think of this as a vacation but as a place where they spend the winter.”
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