BATON ROUGE — From Mardi Gras to statewide fairs and festivals, Louisiana has a lot to offer to people across the country, and around the globe. Tourism has been one of the state’s biggest money makers for years, but recently there’s been a dip in tourists, and their spending.
Lieutenant Governor Billy Nungesser said before Covid, tourism was the fourth largest industry in the state. “In 2019, 53 million people visited Louisiana. They left behind $1.9 billion in taxes. That’s over $1,100 Louisiana family, you and I didn’t have to pay,” Nungesser said on the Louisiana Unfiltered podcast with Kiran Chawla. “It slipped to number five last year. We had a little over 44 million. We’re not quite back to breaking another record.”
Nungesser thought 2025 could be a record-breaking year, but explained international travelers, specifically Canadians who make up about 33% of Louisiana’s international travel market, aren’t interested in crossing the border into the U.S.
“Because of the tariffs and the rhetoric about making Canada 51st state, it just shut down people coming to America. It turned them off so much,” he said.
Nungesser and other state leaders are planning to visit Canada in the coming weeks to try and inspire people and travel agents to come to Louisiana.
“We go and host events. Talk about all the special events, the fairs and festival. All the things that interest Canadians about coming to Louisiana, and we get those travel agents to write, to put packages together,” Nungesser explained. “We’ll be serving Tabasco ice cream at the train station, entertaining some people getting on a train, going three hours, getting off, meeting with travel agents there, doing another presentation at the train station with media.”
Nungesser said it’s going to take more work to get the international tourism market back to what it was, but he expects to see numbers bounce back. “We’re probably going to look at another year or two, hopefully to getting back to record numbers. But it’s still, like I said, the fourth and fifth biggest industry in the state,” he said.
“And it’s important to every corner state. Some of these smaller communities, those tourists, especially international tourists, they stay long and spend more money, and a lot of these small towns rely on those dollars to make ends meet. And that’s where we’re seeing the biggest drop, the international tourists,” he said.
“We saw a lot of bus tours out in Canada come to the Lafayette region for their festival. We need to get those people back booking trips.”
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