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Poll: Where do you go for a day trip outside of Vancouver

First place is the closest
gibsons
Gibsons is a popular destination for people looking for a day trip or a weekend away from Vancouver.

It seems people looking for a day trip outside of Vancouver don't want to go too far.

In a V.I.A. poll the top answer out of seven options was Metro Vancouver, and it wasn't that close.

With about a third of the vote, locals indicated that when they're looking to get away from the City of Vancouver for a day, they don't really look outside the metropolitan area.

The closest contender is the Sea-to-Sky region, north of North Vancouver. With Squamish, Pemberton, and everything between it offers a range of outdoors activities from parasailing to mountain climbing, along with a couple of popular small towns (including the world-famous Whistler, which is no doubt a draw for some).

In third place, but only by a couple of percentage points, is the Fraser Valley, which (aside from hiking) is quite different from the Sea-to-Sky region, filled with farms and agri-tourism, along with several small towns with lots of local history.

Essentially tied for fourth place are all destinations that require a ferry ride or plane. Bowen Island and the Gulf Islands, Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast all got around nine or 10 per cent.

In last place is the U.S. While it was a common destination for daytrippers, especially for shopping, Canada's southern neighbour has seen tourism drop off thanks to a variety of reasons mostly stemming from comments and actions by President Donald Trump and his administration.

Vancouver Is Awesome polled 988 readers and asked the question: Where do you go for a day trip outside of Vancouver?

The poll ran from 7/27/2025 to 8/9/2025. Of the 988 votes, we can determine that 406 are from within the community. The full results are as follows:

The Sunshine Coast 9.61% local, 9.41% total    
The Gulf Islands/Bowen Island 10.10% local, 9.41% total    
Vancouver Island 9.36% local, 11.74% total    
The Fraser Valley 14.78% local, 17.51% total    
Somewhere in Metro Vancouver 30.30% local, 27.94% total    
Sea-to-Sky region 20.20% local, 18.22% total    
The US 5.67% local, 5.77% total    
  Local   Total

Results are based on an online study of adult Vancouver Is Awesome readers that are located in Vancouver. The margin of error - which measures sample variability - is +/- 3.12%, 19 times out of 20.

Vancouver Is Awesome uses a variety of techniques to capture data, detect and prevent fraudulent votes, detect and prevent robots, and filter out non-local and duplicate votes.

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