Agents earn HBC gift cards when booking Insight’s Canada tours

Search for one-way fares to Canada sees huge increase on U.S. election night

TORONTO — The night of the U.S. presidential election, the Canadian Immigration website crashed due to a surge in people – seemingly Americans – trying to access information on how to emigrate to the country. And now, with Donald Trump confirmed as the new President of the United States, Cheapflights.com has reported a huge increase in searches for one-way flights to Canada during election night as well.

According to the company, as of 6 p.m. ET on Election Day, the website experienced more than double the searches for one-way flights to Canada, a 133% increase from the same time frame across the previous four Tuesdays.

As polls closed and results started to roll in, the searches accelerated, jumping to more than 900% between 6 p.m. and midnight. And things didn’t slow down the morning after; searches from 6 p.m. until 8 a.m. the morning after were up more than 1,000% over the average volume in the same window over the last four weeks.

Other destinations that saw spikes in one-way flight searches throughout the course of the night were Japan, Australia, the UK, New Zealand, South Africa and Germany, all of which jumped more than 500% between midnight and 8 a.m. ET compared to the previous four weeks.

In other news, Travelweekly has reported that Royal Jordanian Airlines is poking fun at President-Elect Trump with a new tongue-in-cheek campaign that encourages passengers to “travel to the U.S. while you’re still allowed to!” Trump has continually promised to ban Muslims from entering the country during his run for the presidency. Jordan is a predominantly Sunni Muslim nation.

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