Canadian cities are beginning to recover from more than two years of a terrible tourism drought.
Destination Vancouver says March 2022 occupancy was 65% in the city, up substantially from 40% in March of 2021.
“We’re definitely seeing pick-up,” a spokesperson told me. “Looking ahead to the next six months, hotel bookings are up over 300% compared to same time last year.
“Tourism is coming back.”
Scott Beck, president and CEO of Destination Toronto, tells me that Toronto was at 60% hotel occupancy last month. Toronto was around 40% for the first couple months of the year.
Beck said it’s a big step, and that he’s “guardedly optimistic” about the next few months. But he said business travel, particularly international business travel, has been slow to rebound.
“We’re getting a good deal of leisure travel, as well as Canadian corporate and Canadian associations,” he said. But the big international conferences haven’t returned yet, and those are critical for the city’s economy.
The super-cool lobby at The Douglas Hotel, a Marriott property in Vancouver.
Andrew Weir, Executive Vice President Destination Development for Destination Toronto, said hotel occupancy over the past four weekends has averaged roughly 70%.
“That is still below normal (pre-pandemic) levels but clearly a significant rebound for weekend leisure travel. However, the big caveat is that recovery so far has largely been driven by leisure travel, and still highly regional and local. For a major urban centre like Toronto, we depend almost equally on leisure and business travel and business travel remains well behind.
“Smaller meetings are starting to return but the larger ones take longer given the booking cycles. Transient business travel also remains in a very gradual recovery as many companies have not fully resumed business travel. So there are positive signs, but at the same time those periods of greater travel can mask some of the persistent gaps in business and international travel that remain well behind normal levels,” Weir said.
Hotel booking numbers weren’t available, but Calgary Tourism says travel-related searches from the U.S. are up roughly 67% from a year ago.
For Ottawa, U.S. room night bookings for May to December of this year are 400% higher than last year. The vast majority of those are for the summer months, when leisure travel (as opposed to business travel) is usually strongest.
Of course, the Canadian border was effectively closed to US visitors in 2021.
The Canada Border Service Agency (CBSA) recently announced that more than 1 million travellers were admitted into the country during the week of April 11. Still, visitor numbers are down about 44% from the April 15-17, 2019 period.
