Canadians may be skeptical about travelling outside the country with how the Canadian dollar is holding up against the U.S. dollar.

As of Monday morning the dollar is trading at 73 cents U.S.

Dave Heron at Pace Setter Travel in Okotoks says the decrease in value on the Canadian dollar has produced what may be more seat sales than he's seen in years.

He says travel from Canada to the U.S. is down about by about 20 percent within the past year, but that could be misleading.

"A lot of that 20 percent reflects cross-border traffic where people would drive across, do a days worth of shopping, and come back," he says. "Visitors to Vegas is still up there and Orlando and Disney World, so people are still travelling to the U.S. because the exchange rate differential at the end of the day is a very minor portion of the overall cost of their trip."

Last minute deals online may be a money grab. Heron says tour operators with packages and airlines used to be overly ambitious and would put a lot of seats on the market, which resulted in seat sales because of empty seats left on planes and lost revenue.

He says this triggered a mindset in travellers to wait until the last minute to book in the hopes of catching a deal, but airlines have caught on and are now balancing out their supply-and-demand ratio.

"Airlines that normally would have run a 300 seat aircraft from point A to point B and historically always had 25 to 30 empty seats they would ditch at the last minute, many of them have now gone down to a 140 to 150 seat aircraft to reflect a perceived drop in demand and rationalize the number of empty seats they've got left."

According to Heron, packaged vacations are popular with Albertans and they tend to cover most expenses (such as food, accommodation, and transportation) in Canadian dollars up front, eliminating the need to exchange a great deal of money for the destination.

Heron says the dollar is going strong with other currencies like the euro, Australian dollar, and peso, which leads to other great destination options.

Questions, comments, or story ideas? Email us at news@okotoksonline.com