Posters of famous sites around the world adorn the walls of the Utour Group travel agency headquarters in Beijing. There’s the Eiffel Tower, a cruise ship in the Mediterranean Sea and a full advertisement dedicated to Canada featuring Lake Louise and Vancouver’s skyline.
Flanked by these ads, Li Wei discussed her travel options with a Utour agent. While the Rockies weren’t on her immediate list of places to visit, she said she was considering it more seriously as Beijing started allowing group tours to Canada again this winter.
In fact, Li says she has a nephew studying in Toronto and, at one point many years ago, was considering trying to emigrate.
“I would definitely go there to experience Canada’s life, environment and atmosphere,” she told.
For her, the draw is the “beautiful scenery” and that it’s a “multi-ethnic country.”
In the wake of a diplomatic freeze and COVID-19 measures that saw China impose blanket travel restrictions on Canada, Chinese tourists are considering Canadian options again as they plan their next vacation. This turn is a huge relief to the tourism industry as those visitors make up an essential part of its revenue, while people in Canada are putting China higher on their bucket list, too.
When China first banned group travel to Canada and other countries in 2020, relations between Beijing and Ottawa were already at a low, with tech giant Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou arrested in Vancouver on a U.S. extradition warrant in 2018. That same month, China detained Canadians Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor.
Travel statistics seem to reflect these realities.
Data provided by Statistics Canada shows non-resident visitors entering Canada have steadily increased in the last few years, though they haven’t reached pre-pandemic levels.

The latest available statistics for this year show the number of Chinese visitors this March totalled 17,940, almost double that of 2023 when 10,632 people came.
When the country started relaxing rules in 2023, it began approving group tours again in phases, giving countries like Russia, Argentina and the U.S. “approved destination status.”
Canada was notably left out.
That is, until late 2025, marking a warming up of the bilateral relationship as Prime Minister Mark Carney worked to diversify Canada’s economy and shore up friends in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump’s punishing global tariffs.
At the time Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand said there has been “work over the last number of months … to recalibrate the relationship” through visits to China, including Carney’s invite to meet President Xi Jinping in Beijing in January.
Utour Group is now seeing better business as a result of that push, even if the volume isn’t back to pre-pandemic levels.