No hotel vacancies in Saskatoon
More rooms to be built
A collision of big events like the Jazz Festival, a Cher concert, Pride and seasonal activities has left Saskatoon with no hotel rooms available for last-minute tourists.
Every hotel in Saskatoon is fully booked this weekend, as are many in surrounding areas. Some campgrounds are also at full occupancy.
“It’s a perfect storm for the hotel industry when you have all this happening,” said Randy Fernets, director of industry development and sports tourism for Tourism Saskatoon.
D.J. Surring who lives in Regina, bought tickets for Saturday’s Ben Harper concert months ago. He started looking for a hotel room three weeks ago and ended up scrambling to find a place to stay.
“I always thought there would at least be somewhere half-decent to stay. I was super surprised to find nothing. Expedia, TripAdvisor, Hotels.com — usually you can find a little crack in there somewhere. But there was nothing,” he said.
The few rooms he found were $200 a night, and had bad online reviews, Surring said.
“People were like, ‘I felt like I was going to get shot when I first walked in.’ ”
Luckily, friends of his parents are out of town and he is able to use their condo for the night. He may have had to sell his tickets otherwise, he said.
Darryl Caudle, general manager of the Parktown Hotel, said June is always a busy time.
“Everyone’s trying to get their business done before the end of the school year and there are a lot of sports tournaments, so combining everything together, of course it’s jam packed. Then by July and August it tends to get a lot slower.”
Between 800 and 1,000 new hotel rooms are scheduled to be built within the next couple years, said Steve Johnson, president of the Saskatoon Hotel Association and general manager of the TraveLodge.
He said the extra rooms will be helpful in times like these, but will not necessarily bring in more tourists.
“From a hotelier point of view, unless I’m full every night I don’t think we need more hotels, but as a representative of the association, if the market is saying that we need more rooms and the banks are providing financing, there must be a need for them,” he said.
It will be up to the city to draw enough people to make the construction of the new rooms worthwhile, Fernets said.
“We’ll be challenged to keep working hard to bring people into the city. People have to realize we need to concentrate on primary events and festivals to keep hotels full, people spending money and the city growing.”