Canada banks on outdoors, Indigenous tourism
US visitors to land up north make up big part of revenue
Just 41% of U.S. travelers said in a June 2022 survey that they had a trip to Canada planned in the following nine months. Granted, this was before Canada announced an end to all entry requirements as of Oct. 1, but confidence in vacationing north of the border has taken a hit. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, two-thirds of Canada’s total overnight visitors were from the U.S.
Marsha Walden, Destination Canada’s chief executive officer, says her No. 1 priority is communicating to Americans that Canada is wide open. “We’ve always been a very safe country to visit, but now all of those little hassle factors that used to make it a little harder to plan your trip are gone,” she says.
The U.S. was Canada’s primary tourist market in 2019, with 15 million Americans visiting that year. At the close of 2021, the figure was at a low of 45,000. The good news is that Canada’s tourism revenue could reach just 0.8% below 2019 levels by the end of 2023, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council.
While Canada is bullish on European visitors, Walden says Canadian tourism always comes down to demand from Americans.
“They are 68% of our international visitors, 49% of our revenues. It’s really up to us to make sure that they feel welcome again and they know it’s easy to travel here,” Walden says.
The U.S. market is also critical for Canada’s Indigenous tourism, which Keith Henry, CEO of the Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada, estimates is still at 50% of 2019 levels.
“Even though the summer season was fully operational,” he says, “a lot of our southern Indigenous tourism experiences depend on drive traffic, like experiences in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta. There was very little drive volume that came in, and very little of it spilled into tourism.”
The Indigenous Tourism Association will be pushing a “Buy Authentic” campaign this fall and winter, encouraging travelers to purchase Indigenous-made gifts from its Indigenous Holiday Gift Guide.
Destinations like Niagara
Falls can now market to Americans who live beyond the closest border towns. Janice Thomson, president and CEO of Niagara Falls Tourism, says the area receives 22 million visitors annually, of which 28% traditionally came from the U.S. Thomson stresses that Niagara Falls is a resilient destination that has weathered plenty of crises.
While optimistic, tourism leaders have no illusions that hard work lies ahead, even without COVID-19 barriers. Addressing perception issues is a priority, says Marc Seguin, vice president of policy and government
affairs at the Tourism Industry Association of Canada.
“People are, like, I’m not going to Canada because it’s a mess there. Well, we’ve got to fix that,” he says, citing media coverage about long lines, delays and missed flights at Toronto Pearson International Airport.
To entice Americans to venture north this winter, Canadian businesses are offering special package deals on hotels and tours. Building on a July program that gave away 4,000 year-round Parks Canada Discovery passes, Destination Canada will kick off a
U.S. campaign this month that invites its neighbors to escape holiday season stress by going on “Maple Leave.” The aim is to highlight winter activities.
The drop in the Canadian dollar, coupled with freedom of movement, makes this an opportune time to head north this fall and winter. “Right out of the gates, you have a 25-cent advantage, more or less. There’s a deal right there,” says Seguin.
Moreover, with business travel not fully recovered, “you’ll still find great hotel offers,” Walden says. “Whistler (British Columbia) has Cornucopia coming up in the fall, which is a great multiday festival of fantastic food and wine.”
There are also food and wine country experiences in Ontario province’s Prince Edward County, the Niagara Escarpment and Collingwood area.
Highlights for families include the winter festival of lights at Niagara Falls from November through mid-February, and Niagara Parks Power Station’s new underground tunnel experience for never-seen views from the base of the falls.
A new Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibit will run at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts through February. In Wendake, just outside Quebec City, a new Onhwa’ Lumina multimedia night show takes visitors on a nearly milelong interactive forest trail that tells the story of Canada’s Wendat First Nations people.
Also available are the Indigenous tourism experiences at Metis Crossing in Alberta, about an hour outside Edmonton, which launched during the pandemic and offers an interpretive center, activities and high-end accommodations.
Over the past two years, backyard exploration has become Canada tourism’s lifeline. Thanks in large part to national residents, overall tourism revenue in the first quarter of 2022 reached 72% of 2019 levels.
While visits from the U.S. have been rising since the summer, arrival figures in July showed that the number of American visitors was still 37% below 2019 levels for that month.
Still, overall hotel occupancy in Canada reached a post-pandemic high in August, at just 3% below pre-pandemic numbers, thanks to domestic visitors.
Indigenous tourism businesses have begun to see more inquiries from U.S. driving travelers interested in such experiences as forest hikes with Mahikan Trails in Alberta or fireside storytelling and medicinal walks with Warrior Women in Edmonton.
Sources agree that a dearth of workers ranks as the biggest problem. More than 8% of tourism jobs — 149,000 positions — remained unfilled as of the second quarter 2022.
More events would help, too. Demand from Americans accounted for 19% of Canada’s business meeting bookings in 2020, before COVID-19 hit, second only to demand from Canadians. Cancellations from 2020 and 2021 have been rebooked into 2023, Walden confirms. “So the real down period — that we’re madly in sales mode around right now — is the latter half of 2023 into 2024, where there was not a big sales cycle going on.”
Canada aims to recover the kind of aggressive growth it experienced for nine years through 2019, when tourism was growing at double the pace of gross domestic product, Seguin says.
Walden expects Americans not to resist returning. “We’ve always been an easy place to come for a nice little getaway. It’s easy to have a city vacation and then, an hour later, be out hiking in the wilderness.”