(Tourism Red Deer)

By Sheldon Spackman

Town Hall Meetings

Optimism for Alberta’s tourism industry

Mar 24, 2022 | 9:20 AM

Red Deer was a stop this week in a series of town hall meetings taking place across the province in hopes of encouraging people to travel once again.

The town halls hosted by Travel Alberta and the Tourism Industry Association of Alberta, follow two years of coping with travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Darren Reeder, Board Advisor for the Tourism Industry Association of Alberta, says the industry has been waiting patiently to get to this point.

“We’ve been waiting for two years to be given the green light to welcome visitors back and visitors from afar, and for airlines to be able to fill as much as to capacity as they can, people from supporting countries to come and visit Alberta,” he explains. “We finally have the clarification that we needed in policy that’s going to allow businesses to have as much confidence as they can find, given the current situation, to start to hire people and operate for the first summer that we’ve really operated in in three years, because the last two summers, we had no international travel at all.”

Reeder says the tourism town halls began in Banff earlier this month, and have been through Medicine Hat, Lethbridge, Pincher Creek, Red Deer, Edmonton and Calgary so far, with three more communities still to visit by the middle of May.

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He says the past two years have been nothing short of decimating for the tourism and hospitality industry.

“The summer season is almost upon us and the majority of tourism businesses make anywhere from 50 per cent to two-thirds of their annual revenue in a very short window that we call summer, and that’s usually from May to September,” says Reeder. “So the cash that they generate in those months becomes part of what supports them and allows them to cash flow operations in the slower months of the year. So it’s hugely important we have international visitors come back into the market.”

“We’ve been grateful for Albertans during the pandemic to have supported us as generously as they did,” adds Reeder. “But as we know, they now have some outbound travel plans, so this is why it’s so important that we replace that loss with international visitors.”

Reeder acknowledges, however, that the Russian invasion of Ukraine could have an impact on international travel.

“I think it creates a confluence of a lot of concerns within the European Union in terms of the safety of travel,” shares Reeder. “So I believe, to my understanding, that airline planning is a very real time exercise. There’s a lot of questions about the predictability of air flight activity within certain parts of Europe perhaps this summer, so I would say certainly that checks into our consideration for who might be travelling to Canada or Alberta this summer.”

Despite the high cost of fuel for both airlines and travelers by vehicle, Reeder feels that pent up travel demand will outweigh those concerns.

“People, we can’t forget, have been trapped for the last two years, quite literally,” he points out. “They’ve not been able to travel where they would like to go and spend the dollars they would. I think in the short term, people are desperate to get back to their former way of life that they haven’t been able to enjoy the last two years.”

Rene Rondeau, Executive Director, Tourism Red Deer, says the town hall in Red Deer was a chance to reconnect and figure out what the industry’s growth and recovery will look like moving forward, such as new grant opportunities and different strategies to get out of the pandemic.

“We’re always looking to grow our membership group. We have a lot of great businesses that we’re here to support and work with and help them develop and grow their business,” he explains.

He points to the arts and culture scene in central Alberta, as well as the many restaurants, hoteliers, and local attractions that Tourism Red Deer continues to work with.

“There’s a good core group of attractions in central Alberta and in Red Deer for that matter that have had a hard time,” says Rondeau. “So our membership is growing, we’re having our AGM on April 21, looking for more people to come to the AGM and be a part of that conversation, from membership, to others who aren’t sure about tourism and want to learn more about it. We really want to grow our industry and be stronger together.”

All things considered, Rondeau says he’s optimistic about the upcoming travel season.

“There’s going to be a lot of events returning to the forefront and people will eventually, gradually, feel comfortable going to do those things and we’re seeing that already.”