An expansion of The Strong National Museum of Play two years ago came with an aggressive goal to increase yearly attendance to 1 million.
Museum officials had hoped to be at or near that number in 2026.
Instead, attendance is down, from 693,000 last year to a projected 665,000.
“The vast majority of that (drop) being from Canada,” said Sara Poe, senior vice president for marketing and guest experiences. “Overwhelming majority.”
The next two weeks could boost the final tallies, with school break on both sides of the border. But the museum likely will see 30,000 fewer Canadian visits compared to last year, and 65,000 fewer than they’d budgeted for in 2025, Poe said.
The attendance goal for 2026 is now just to hold steady.
President Donald Trump has been a major factor in the falloff. His on-and-off tariffs, disparaging of Canada and blustering about making the country the 51st state at the start of his second term met with calls up north to boycott American products and travel. The once-growing tourism sector took a sudden downturn in February. And it hasn’t recovered. Locally, the Museum of Play provides a good measure of the tourism market, as it closely tracks visitor demographics.
“The trajectory that we had moving forward into 2024, and then what we had hoped to continue in 2025 is just, is just completely gone,” Poe said.
The number of people crossing the border from Canada into the United States is down 21% this year through October, according to the most recent data available from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Those numbers would include returning U.S. residents and are buffered somewhat by January still having registered strong year-over-year growth. The drop is slightly less at the nearest Buffalo and Niagara Falls crossings — down 18% but still a difference of 1.5 million.
“We are expecting a slow improvement in that sector,” said Don Jeffries, president and CEO of VisitRochester. “But the other thing is, besides the sports (hockey tournaments, in particular), you know, our meeting and convention business was good ... and that drove the numbers.”
Jeffries points specifically to a bump in hotel bookings, which he said outpaced the rest of the state in year-over-year growth during several months this year.
“We’ve been very intentional about how we’ve stayed connected to our Canadian neighbors during what has been a complicated and emotional time for cross-border travel,” Diana Rapp Keating, VisitRochester’s vice president of marketing, said via email.
The local tourism agency launched a “Dear Canada” marketing campaign this summer, making a direct appeal and pointing to a longstanding friendship that would endure.
“The Dear Canada campaign was never meant to be a hard sell,” Rapp Keating said. “It was a message of respect, shared values, and reassurance, essentially saying, ‘We’ll be here when you’re ready.’”
But comments quickly soured on social media channels like Facebook and Instagram, leading officials to pivot more to streaming, digital audio and billboards, even live television interviews. Overall, she said, the message "has been very well received and generated meaningful engagement — even as broader sentiment fluctuated.”
Going into this year, Canada had been museum officials’ growth focus, Poe said. They’d tried marketing to other nearby domestic metros but weren’t seeing the speed of growth they were getting north of the border.
Outside of Rochester and Buffalo, the Toronto area is the Museum of Play’s biggest market. Last year, 1 in 10 museum visitors came from Canada. Now it’s 1 in 17.
“Addressing the elephant in the room doesn't seem to work, right?” Poe said. “Continually beating someone over the head with a, ‘But we still like you. But we still like you. But we still like you,’ message ... that doesn't play well.
“We don’t want to turn this into anything combative.”
The museum has cut its marketing spending north of the border by about 80% to what Poe described as “ground-cover advertising.” Just the basics, reminding people they are here, current exhibits, hours.
“We need to sort of take stock and determine, geographically ... where we go next?” Poe said. “If this Canada thing is going to last for a number of years, where is there real growth opportunity?”
It’s a financial hit, but the museum has flexibility built into its budget, and Poe said she doesn’t foresee the need to make drastic changes in the near future. Numbers are still up overall. Even with the falloff, Canadian attendance is expected to be slightly above where it was just two years ago. Go back another year, to 2022, and the museum was noting that its nearly 500,000 visitors had put it back almost to pre-pandemic attendance levels.
“Would things be easier if we could see that type of growth and continued, you know, Canadian geographic growth? Absolutely, of course,” Poe said. “Of course it would be. But it's not putting us in a precarious budget situation at this point.”
Still hoping to grow attendance, she said, the push has turned to older kids and adults. The expanded video game and interactive offerings are retaining older children. The museum has bolstered its offerings for seniors, including a speaker series. And it is planning to market itself as an option for business retreats and team building.
“We're really looking at those audience pockets,” she said. “For 2026 at the very least, until some of this settles down for a minute, we can focus our growth that way, rather than geographically.”
For a good number of those adults, the vintage and other noteworthy toys in the museum’s collection are the toys of their childhood.
“The word of ’26 for the museum is ‘nostalgia,’” she said. “It’s going be our focus.”
