Tourism flying high: City official

By: Sandi Krasowski, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter Source: The Chronicle-Journal

Just back from the Tourism Industry Association of Ontario summit, Paul Pepe, the City of Thunder Bay’s Tourism manager and members of the destination development team have brought back insights to the latest in tourism trends.

Pepe says the two-day conference, which was held in Ottawa in late October, provided ample networking opportunities, researching and the learning of best practices from other areas of the province.

“We work really closely with Destination Ontario, which is the official provincial tourism marketing agency,” said Pepe, who also serves as the chairman of the Northern Marketing Committee for Destination Ontario.

Pepe says they were happy to share with their southern Ontario counterparts that Thunder Bay’s tourism landscape is doing well.

“This summer, we ran some of Ontario’s highest hotel occupancy rates for July and August,” he pointed out. “Air connectivity is really strong for our smaller city compared to other cities across Canada. And all those statistics really get on the radar screen.”

He said, considering the size of Thunder Bay, the community has “exceptional” air lift, especially to Toronto, Ottawa and Winnipeg and Calgary.

“Thunder Bay’s air lift is stronger than a lot of other Canadian small cities, and that is something that really generates a lot of attention on the national tourism landscape,” he said.

Thunder Bay is a diversified tourism destination for sport, business, leisure and health care, which makes for a diversified tourism economy, and that helps strengthen the air connectivity.

Pepe says having a strong provincial tourism industry requires working together, collaborating and sharing information with each other.

“This year was one of the strongest tourism seasons in Ontario in a long time, and Thunder Bay was no exception,” he said. “This is probably our strongest tourism season that we’ve had in years, with domestic and international air travel.”

He noted that American travel was down a bit, but not as much as they thought it would be earlier this year.

“And we saw the American numbers started to pick up in August and September. The gap was starting to close on that market,” he said.

Pepe attributes some of this to many Canadians cancelling their U.S. trips and deciding to explore domestically.

“We certainly saw that here at Thunder Bay,” Pepe said. “We saw a huge lift in domestic travellers, Canadians exploring Canada, and the European market was choosing Canada over the U.S. for their vacations as well. Even though that’s a small part of our market, we definitely saw it grow. The domestic and the overseas markets really led the lift in traffic that we saw.”

Pepe noted that Thunder Bay also had a strong year for sports and business events, and conferences.

“It’s not just the leisure traveller for us. It’s the whole mix,” he said.

Using the tourism development fund, which is powered by a share of the municipal accommodation tax, the City was able to successfully invest in many business and sports events, bringing them to the city.