THUNDER BAY – According to city tourism manager Paul Pepe, the industry has a $170-million impact on the local economy.
In addressing council on Monday with his annual fall tourism update, Pepe said more than 1,300 businesses in Thunder Bay rely on tourism to succeed, while about 3,000 full-time jobs owe their existence in part to visitors from out of town.
There’s plenty of reason for optimism, he added, pointing to a long-standing trend of American visitors staying home in greater numbers during election years. This did not happen in 2016, Pepe said, noting that the combination of a weaker Canadian dollar has reinvigorated American interest in traveling north of the border, to the tune of a six per cent increase overall.
That’s good news for Northwestern Ontario, said Pepe, who nonetheless is not only relying on attracting American visitors to Thunder Bay, but instead making overtures overseas.
Tourist visits from the United Kingdom and Germany are on the rise and Pepe said he sees a potential for long-term growth.
“That’s very much a long-term plan, a 20-year plan,” Pepe said. “But we’ve got to start now.”
Pepe, in a report presented to council, said the tourism industry has shown growth in a number of performance indicators in 2016, including increased U.S. resident border crossings and usage of visitor centres.
Anecdotal evidence suggests retail, attraction and culinary partners are also seeing increases in out-of-town traffic.
The comment led Northwood Coun. Shelby Ch’ng to joke one local attraction was taking aim at the popularity of another, saying the Thunder Bay Conservatory was working to topple the Terry Fox Lookout from atop Trip Advisor’s list of top attractions in the area.
Pepe said Tourism Thunder Bay has renewed its contract with Tourism Northern Ontario to deliver outdoor adventure, touring, convention and sports-related marketing initiatives to Northwestern Ontario, a $464,000 investment in 2016-17.
He’s also shifting his marketing campaigns to digital media sources, including the website northwesternontario.travel, to capture a new audience.
The city, with help from senior levels of government, has started to emphasize the importance of hosting out-of-town journalists.
Pepe pointed to a number of German writers who came to Northwestern Ontario this year, at a cost of about $4,000 to the city.
It generated an estimated $360,000 in earned media through the stories they produced.
Hotel occupancy rates were also up in 2016, with a record-setting 91.8 per cent rate in August, up nearly nine percentage points over the same month in 2015.
About 15 per cent more people visited the abovementioned Terry Fox Lookout centre, with a new single-day record of 902 vistors, besting the previous record of 724. Federal parks data show a 33 per cent increase over three years.
