New statistics released from Tourism Toronto show Americans are staying away from the GTA as a travel destination.

For this year alone, there was a nine per cent drop in the number of American tourists visiting the city, and visitor spending is down 8.1 per cent.

Neil Mainville, a bus and boat tour operator, says he's seen the signs of a dropoff.

"Overall in the city, just from dealing with concierges, hotels and a lot of people in the hospitality sector, we're aware that tourism numbers are down this year in Toronto," he told CTV News.

The government of Ontario is reporting similar results with an 8.1 per cent decline in American visits to the province.

Toronto Tourism says the decline can be partly blamed on the high Canadian dollar and a lack of knowledge of new passport regulations.

But tourism representatives say the loss of American tourists is being replaced by visitors from overseas.

"It's really a mixed picture in tourism right now. The U.S. is a difficult market for sure with the passport issues and the dollar makes it difficult to market to the U.S., told Andrew Weir told CTV News.

"The real success story is in the overseas market, we're seeing double-digit growth from countries like Mexico, Japan, China, Korea; the Asian countries are growing significantly along with a lot of the European countries."

Overseas travel to Toronto is up by 7.1 per cent for this summer and overseas visits are up 3.9 per cent across the province.

Tourism Toronto says an aggressive marketing campaign is attracting people outside of North America.

"We host hundreds of writers from around the world. They come to Toronto, the experience it and then they write about it in the travel section," Weir said.

Business owners, dependent on the summer tourism boom, have also noticed a shift from visitors south of the boarder to visitors from overseas.

"We've picked up in everything from Scottish, Irish, we've got a lot of eastern European people coming this year," David Hughes, a King Street restaurant owner, told CTV News.

Overseas tourists are pumping their dollars into the city as well with overseas revenue up 2.6 per cent this summer.

With a report from CTV's Desmond Brown