TOURISM TAKES PANDEMIC HIT
Industry will take years to recover, experts say
COVID-19 will have cost the city $2.6 billion in visitors' spending by the end of the summer and a full recovery will take years, warns Ottawa Tourism.
“This is unprecedented. I know that's an overused word, but this is worse than SARS and 9/11 and other crises combined,” says Catherine Callary, vice-president of destination development for Ottawa Tourism.
“The return of the domestic visitor to Ottawa probably won't happen until into the fall — and even that is going to start as a trickle. It will be the leisure traveller coming first, while businesses and conferences and sporting events are going to take their time,” Callary said.
“We're looking at a few years of recovery, not months.”
Ottawa Tourism estimates the city lost $1.4 billion in visitors' spending in 2020 and is forecasting a $1.2 billion loss this year.
The grim numbers wouldn't surprise to John Cundell, whose family has run horse carts in Ottawa for three generations — first hauling milk crates and rag-andbone collectors, but now tourists and sightseers.
“We haven't turned a wheel here in six weeks,” Cundell said. After a slow summer in 2020, Cundell said his business had a “mini boom” earlier this year when the winter shutdown restrictions were lifted. But now his two horses stand idle. And with the cancellation of mass events such as Ottawa Race Weekend and Bluesfest, the summer ahead looks bleak.
“All those festivals bring people and people are my business,” he said.
About 90 per cent of visitors to Ottawa come from within Canada, with about five per cent from the
U.S. and five per cent from elsewhere overseas, Callary said. But the shut down of foreign travellers has had an outsized effect.
“We miss them very much. U.S. and international visitors tend to stay longer and spend more, so they have a greater impact than their numbers.”
Overall, hotel occupancy in Ottawa is down 65 to 70 per cent from what it was in 2019, she said.
“It's definitely going to affect us. We are tourism based,” said Jill Messier, manager of RentABike, headquartered along the Rideau Canal opposite the National Arts Centre. “It's often people who don't have their own bikes and want to see the city. That's often Americans or people from Europe so the border closure is definitely impacting business.”
But Messier says she's encouraged to see the number of people out on bikes and by the NCC's decision to close parkways for cyclists and pedestrians. Biking is so popular now that it's hard to find one in stores, so RentABike has stepped up its repair business to help people keep their old two-wheelers on the road. Demand is so high that Messier's bike suppliers are already asking about orders to be placed a year from now.
Day or weekend visitors from Montreal and Toronto have also helped to keep RentABike's 300 rentals on the road.
With domestic and international travel at a near standstill because of the pandemic, many Ottawans are heeding the call of the wild like never before. Provincial parks are booked five months in advance, with online reservations filling up within minutes of opening each day. Camping permits at popular parks like Algonquin or Killbear on Georgian Bay can be found at double and triple their value on resale sites, leading to allegations of scalpers using automated `bots to snap up reservations.
Business has been steady for Kat and Niels Klauk at Opeongo Mountain Resort near Eganville. Though they've lost a few American customers by the border shutdown, the cabins and campsites are nearly full.
But the pandemic means a new worry for the couple, who bought the resort seven years ago.
“The question is how much do you want to put yourself out there?” Kat said. “We're a momand-pop business and we can't get our vaccines. We're too young. And yet we have to expose ourselves to the public. If we get sick we have to shut down the business. That's always a worry because it's just the two of us.”
While the year-after-year regulars provide a steady business, Klauk has seen an increase in demand from tenters and people travelling in RVs. The changing public health rules are sometimes difficult to keep up with, she said.
“We may not be able to open our bathrooms again, so we have to make sure that everyone is self-sufficient,” she said. “And it's up to us to police them and make sure they're following the rules.”
Tourism and travel have been one of the biggest casualties of the pandemic, said Ottawa Tourism's Callary.
“It's acknowledged that tourism has been the first hit, the hardest hit and will take the longest to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and it's the absolute truth,” she said.
“Nationally, we're hearing that it's knocked off about 35 years of growth in tourism. It's going to be a long rebuild. All destinations across Canada are facing this `years to recovery' scenario.”
But the industry is resilient and she's counting on a huge boost from the pent-up demand for travel when the pandemic ends. If each of the 400,000 households in the city were to host a couple of friends or family from out of town
for a long weekend when health restrictions lift, it would inject $500 million in visitor spending, she said.
“People are still dreaming about travel. That's the silver lining. Research shows that even just thinking about and planning travel makes people happy. And everyone is thinking, `Where am I going to go when this is all over?'
“Human nature is that we like to see new places and meet new people. We will recover. With the vaccines, there's light at the end of the tunnel it's just going to take a little while to get there.”
People are still dreaming about travel. That's the silver lining.