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TIAC

The Tourism Industry Association of Canada (TIAC) says it’s “heartened” by news that Canada will drop its COVID-19 vaccine border requirements by the end of September, make the ArriveCan application optional, and end the outstanding random COVID-19 testing for travellers. A southern Ontario MP went much further, saying delays in changing the rules badly damaged Canada’s tourism economy. Published reports say Prime Minister Justin Trudeau yesterday signed off on the concept. Ottawa brought in the rules under an order-in-council earlier this year, but that order expires on September 30. Which would mean Canadians and other travellers will have a new Read more

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Tourism Weeks kicked off in Ottawa today. Randy Boissonnault, Minister of Tourism and Associate Minister of Finance, Beth Potter, President and CEO of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada (TIAC), and the Parliamentary Tourism Caucus officially launched National Tourism Week at a press conference in the nation’s capital. For more than 10 years, Tourism Week has been presented by TIAC to encourage all tourism partners to come together to celebrate tourism as vital to the Canadian economy and to the social and cultural fabric of communities across the nation. The seven-day awareness campaign invites private- and public-sector partners in Canada Read more

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An influential Canadian tourism group is urging Ottawa to loosen testing restrictions and allow arriving passengers to get rapid COVID-19 tests. The Canadian government currently requires arriving passengers to provide a negative result from a PCR-style COVID test taken within 72 hours of their scheduled departure. But those tests are expensive, and results in some cases are taking longer than 72 hours to be reported. And that makes travel difficult. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson this week said it will no longer require re-departure tests for people travelling to Great Britain. The Guardian reports that Johnson said the Omicron variant Read more

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Woe is the Canadian dollar, eh? Hovering below the 70 cent line, and causing many of us who like to vacation in the U.S. no end of worry.The price of oil is seemingly to blame, what with barrels going for an unheard of $30 or so these days. As oil prices have cratered, so has the loonie, sparking all sorts of business headlines about what the government should do. At the risk of repeating an age old mantra of mine, I’m disturbed by the lack of talk about tourism. Oh, sure, there’s the odd story about how our dollar is Read more

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It’s about time. I’ve been arguing for years that Canadian tourism folks are sailing the wrong waters by spending too much time and energy on emerging markets and forgetting the giant next door. Now I’ve got more company. In a press release issued yesterday in advance of next week’s Canadian Tourism Marketing Summit, it was revealed that a survey by HLT Advisory found an incredible 79 per cent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with a proposal to focus increasingly scarce marketing resources on U.S. residents. Only four per cent of folks disagreed with something called the “Connecting America” initiative, Read more

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