Posted Dec 16, 2015, 5:39 PM
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Reason and Freedom
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Join Date: Jul 2009
Location: Vancouver/Toronto
Posts: 4,016
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It would be interesting to know why the cruise ship numbers are still substantially lower than they were 10 years ago, when around a million passengers sailed each season.
Quote:
Tourists flood Vancouver in record-breaking year
Growth attributed to weak dollar, one-off events and conventions
By Matthew Robinson, Vancouver Sun, December 16, 2015 7:42 AM
As Princess Cruises’s Ruby Princess left port Tuesday, putting a cap on Vancouver’s 2015 cruise season, new tourism figures rolled in showing the city is destined to break its own record for visitors.
Vancouver is on track for nearly 9.4 million overnight visitors this year, breaking last year’s record of 8.9 million, said Stephen Pearce, Tourism Vancouver’s vice-president of marketing.
“It is exciting,” Pearce said. “Between the leisure visitors and the base of meetings visitors and sports delegates, we had a banner year.”
As usual, Vancouver’s daily hotel occupancy rate was highest in summer, exceeding 90 per cent at times and even striking 99 per cent during the gold medal game of the FIFA Women’s World Cup, according to Tourism Vancouver. But this year, strong occupancy rates started early in spring and stayed late into the fall.
While single events like the World Cup helped drive the numbers, this year is a record breaker for a range of reasons, Pearce said.
Vancouver’s cruise season started early and ended late this year, bringing more than 800,000 passengers to town on 228 calls by 32 ships, according to Port Metro Vancouver.
Additional itineraries were booked in spring and fall, like this week’s departure of the Ruby Princess to L.A. en route to Hawaii, said Carmen Ortega at Port Metro Vancouver. “It’s been a good year for us.”
The weak dollar also helped spur tourist traffic into the city, according to Tourism Vancouver. Last year there were 1.9 million overnight visitors from the U.S., and the latest numbers are on pace to beat that by more than eight per cent. There were similarly large jumps in visitors from Japan, France, South Korea, Mexico and China this year.
Some visitors came for one of the 19 “citywide” conventions — those that draw at least 1,000 out-of-towners — and they brought with them a heavier than average economic punch.
“The meetings business, from a volume perspective, it’s a relatively small piece of our total business,” Pearce said. “Most of the business we get is pleasure visitors. But from a yield perspective, it’s very strong. It’s the most important piece of business that we get.”
While many domestic tourists will stay with friends or family, convention-goers typically stay in downtown hotels and spend heavily on food and entertainment, Pearce explained. This year, convention-goers brought in about $92 million in direct spending, according to Tourism Vancouver.
Meanwhile, the large conventions also generated business for surrounding cities,” Pearce said. “We certainly saw that in the summertime when properties in Richmond, Surrey and Burnaby were getting great (numbers) because of the fact there wasn’t sufficient room supply in downtown Vancouver.”
Tourism Vancouver touted its own marketing efforts in 11 countries and in forming partnerships with hoteliers, the airport, the Vancouver Convention Centre and other tourism groups as helping draw record visitors. Pearce noted Vancouver had higher hotel occupancy and a higher average daily rate than did Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. It’s not something that happens every year, he said.
Next year’s cruise season should see the same number of calls, but more visitors on account of larger ships coming into port, Ortega said.
Pearce also sees next year as staying strong, but said the industry needs to work on generating more business in what appears to be an already shrinking off-season.
“We need to continue to find ways to move people into Vancouver year-round.”
Source: http://www.vancouversun.com/travel/touri...record+breaking+year/11592028/story.html
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