Spending · where the money goes
Vancouver’s spending story is concentrated where the visitors land: cruise calls injected more than $1 billion into the local economy in 2025 ($3 million per call on average), downtown hotels printed a CAD 518 ADR in World Cup June 2026, and the city led Canada with a CAD 223 RevPAR in 2025. The airport adds $15 billion-plus to national GDP.
The cruise economy is the cleanest spending perimeter in the city: 301 calls in 2025, each worth an average $3 million to local businesses, for a season total above $1 billion. Cruise lines account for $660 million of direct local spending; passengers average $450 ashore. The 2026 season — roughly 358 calls and 1.4 million passengers — puts those multipliers on a bigger base, with shore-power expansion from 2027 adding a 3,300-tonne emissions cut to the port’s value case.
The hotel economy sets the ceiling. Vancouver led Canada in 2025 (78.4% occupancy, CAD 223.05 RevPAR) and the World Cup June showed the upside: a CAD 518 downtown ADR (+26%) and CAD 378 RevPAR, even as tournament displacement pushed occupancy down 18 points. The national frame matters too: Canada’s summer 2025 tourism revenue reached CAD 58.96 billion (+6.0%), with international spending at $6.4 billion in Q4 alone.
Two cautions belong in any Vancouver spending read. First, the June 2026 hotel print is a tournament artifact — spectacular rate, displaced base; it measures event pricing power, not run-rate. Second, the city lacks a single audited annual visitor-spend total; the credible anchors are the cruise perimeter ($1B+, port-published), the STR hotel series, and YVR’s $15B GDP contribution.
The TIO framing: track the per-call multiplier and the RevPAR line. If the 2026 cruise season lands its 1.4 million passengers at anything like the $3-million-per-call average, Vancouver posts a $1.1–1.3 billion cruise summer on its own — and with hotel supply pinned at ~25,900 rooms, nearly every marginal visitor dollar shows up in rate, not volume.
The TIO Read: Vancouver monetizes scarcity better than any city in the series. The cruise season is a billion-dollar machine with a published per-call multiplier; the hotel market converts every incremental guest into rate because there is nowhere else to sleep. Read the city’s spending through two lines — the $3-million-per-call average (times 358 scheduled 2026 calls) and the RevPAR track toward CBRE’s CAD 230 forecast. Between them they capture most of what visitors leave behind. The $518 June ADR was a dress rehearsal; the supply-constrained 2027 summer is the opening night.
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