A drop in the bucket list: For N.L.'s tourism industry, this will likely be another trying year
Ontario's COVID crisis will likely mean many potential visitors will be delaying plans to see N.L.
When I woke up on Friday morning, some difficult news was waiting for me. Swiping up my phone's screen, I saw a push notification that moved while I had been sleeping: "Ontario orders hospitals to halt non-emergency surgeries as COVID-19 patients fill ICUs."
The pandemic news out of Ontario has been troubling all week — indeed, for weeks now — and stands in contrast not only to the clinical situation here in Newfoundland and Labrador, but to a story that's been back in the news in the last few days. Namely, the aspirations in the tourism industry of getting fully back to normal.
"Ontario is our hub, and without Ontario, our businesses here aren't going to function right. They can't," Ernie Watkins, who owns the Twillingate-New World Island Dinner Theatre, told colleague Garrett Barry for a story we published this week.
Watkins says three out of every four of his customers come from Ontario — that is, in a normal year. Other businesses may not have quite that high a ratio, but there's little doubt that much of N.L.'s success in tourism has been based on attracting visitors from central Canada.
Which means that another year of staycations and even the Atlantic bubble is not going to bridge the gap.
There's the crux.
Awful timing
While the COVID situation here has largely been contained, Ontario is, to be blunt, on fire. The focus there right now is not on booking vacations, but on a third round of stay-at-home emergency orders. An out-of-province vacation is currently just something to dream about at a time when simply going out down the road for dinner is out of the question.
For the local tourism industry, the timing truly is awful. The race between infections and injections matters a great deal to businesses that cannot thrive on local trade alone.
Not only that, even deciding to come to Newfoundland and Labrador has never been a spontaneous decision.
WATCH | Garrett Barry reports from Twillingate, where businesses are hoping for a return of mainland visitors:
We are, instead, a "bucket list" proposition — and a great one — dependent on people who make deliberate plans to get here, not unlike a once-in-a-lifetime trip to a European capital or a faraway global landmark. We may be part of the same country, but, as one of my colleagues quipped, no one in Toronto ever thinks of Newfoundland and Labrador for a spontaneous weekend getaway.
Even when flights are normal, you need to plan ahead for the trip, and do your homework. And it's not a cheap little getaway, either. Many people in N.L. know about the expense of flying to the mainland; it's definitely the same concern coming from the other direction. As a friend recently, and bluntly, put it to me, we're a luxury destination, whether we know it or not.
It's to the credit of Newfoundland and Labrador's long-running tourism campaign that we rank well as a desired destination. For about 15 years, ads designed by Target Marketing have sold the province's breezy way of life, rugged scenery and folksy characteristics. While it's definitely a curated, colour-saturated campaign in which the sun seems to be shining with conspicuous brightness, many of the elements still ring true.
Clotheslines are more than symbolic
I remember hearing Target president Noel O'Dea describing how a key that helped unlock the campaign was reading about how clotheslines, of all things, were banned in some mainland places. To O'Dea, the simple clothesline became a symbol of a way of life that itself became the tourism product.
Clotheslines feature in several of the campaigns over the years. One 2010 spot is focused entirely on them. On one occasion, Target even constructed a huge billboard along a Toronto highway that mimicked an open window, complete with billowing curtains, showing both coastline and clothesline, the latter holding up colourful quilts.
Tourism operators are dying to get back into the game, as they used to know it. Destination St. John's launched a new campaign this week, featuring colourful shots of a sunny city. It was photographed months ago in the pandemic, on hopes of a better time when people could move more freely about.
That time will come.
But the clock is ticking. In an ordinary year, this is when folks in Ontario would be thinking months out about booking flights and accommodations, thinking about itineraries, looking for places to go that might match those fanciful scenes they've seen in ads.
Last month, an advisory committee on tourism urged Premier Andrew Furey to open up travel from all of Canada by July 1. That's ambitious advice for a province that still has in place a controversial travel ban on incoming visitors (although exemptions seem to be granted more liberally now).
It's also ambitious given the perilous state that Ontario and other provinces now find themselves with COVID-19. Even as the national campaign to vaccinate heats up, it seems unlikely the 2021 tourism season in N.L. will resemble the pre-pandemic ones.
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