Tourism Officials: More Help Needed for Devastated Canadian Industry

Canada’s tourism industry has been hit harder than any other area of the Canadian economy, and further help is badly needed, panellists said during a virtual discussion on Wednesday.

Speaking at a virtual meeting of Toronto’s prestigious Empire Club, industry officials said programs such as CERB and other government measures have helped. But much more needs to be done.

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Marsha Walden, president and chief executive officer of Destination Canada, said airline revenues in Canada, which includes smaller, regional airlines, are down 95%.

“There’s no way to characterize what’s gone on in our industry other than it’s been completely devastating. We’ve been brought to our knees in the space of just six months,” she said.

“The tourism industry was hit first, hit the hardest and will be the last to recover,” said Ross Jefferson, president and chief executive officer of Discover Halifax.

“I think there’s lots more that needs to be done for the industry,” he said. “I think the speech from the throne was encouraging and I know there’s lots of work still to do.”

Scott Beck, president and CEO at Destination Toronto, said business events in the city are down 87% during the pandemic. Some rural areas of the province are said to be operating at 60 to 70% capacity for hotels, but the occupancy rate in Toronto’s downtown core is just 13%, he said.

Beck and other panellists said Canada’s 14-day quarantine law is a major impediment to travel.

“If a one-day business trip becomes a 15-day experience, it’s not going to happen.”

Beck said measures such as contact tracing, rapid COVID-19 testing and continued diligence with masks and social distancing, along with cleanliness protocols in hotels, airlines and other places, would allow for shorter quarantine periods.

The tourism sector which employs 10% of Canadians. Since February, it has accounted for 30.3% of the almost three million jobs that have been shed in the country.

Within tourism itself, more than 42% of jobs have been lost since February. That’s 881,700 jobs in total.

Beck said some Canadians still appear leery of taking plane trips. But he said there’s no record of COVID-19 being transmitted on an airplane.

The head of the Tourism Industry Association of Ontario said travel tax credits from governments would help encourage Canadians to spend their vacation dollars at home and boost the country’s devastated tourism and hospitality industries.

TIAO president and chief executive officer Beth Potter said the subject has been raised with the Ontario government and that her group is supporting the Travel Industry Association of Canada (TIAC) in a similar ask at the federal level.

“We’ve always had a travel deficit” from people spending their holidays outside the country, Potter said. “If we can capture that, and if snowbirds can’t cross the border and people aren’t going elsewhere in the world, we know that would be helpful. We could almost recoup our losses if we could get the domestic market to spend all their vacation dollars here at home.”

Marsha Walden, president and chief executive officer at Destination Canada, said Canadians spend $43 billion a year outside the country, while inbound visitors to Canada spend $22 billion.

“If we could capture 25% of that outbound revenue it would be a huge boost to our industry.”

Still, she said the only way for the industry to recover is to start welcoming international visitors again when we can.