Manitoba seeing increased tourism spending, but decreased visitors

The tourism industry was one of the first causalities of the pandemic and one of the last to crawl out; however, Travel Manitoba now says there is cautious optimism moving forward.

Caleigh Christie and her family have been running Falcon Trails Resort since 1996, and like most tourism operators, the COVID-19 pandemic threw them a curveball.

"When everyone was stuck at home because of travel restrictions, everyone wanted to come to us and so we actually had 100 per cent occupancy for almost 2.5 years,” Christie said.

She said she considers Falcon Trails' pandemic story a relatively happy one.

However, the same can't be said for the tourism industry as a whole.

"[The years] 2020 and 2021 were pretty much write-offs. They were really tough years and as you can imagine, we had border closures, we had all kinds of issues that we were dealing with,” said Colin Ferguson, president and CEO of Travel Manitoba.

Now, Travel Manitoba says the industry is bouncing back.

The Crown corporation says 8.7 million people visited the province last year and spent $1.8 billion.

"Our 2022 numbers did surpass virtually all of our expectations,” Ferguson said.

While the dollar amount broke 2019's record of more than $1.6 billion spent in the province, the number of visitors dropped from around 10.5 million.

"We’ve got a ways to go to get back to that. Most of our business is on the backs of Manitobans travelling throughout the province. That’s consistent with other provinces across the country,” Ferguson said.

He added that the next step is getting more U.S. and international travellers back into Manitoba.

According to Christie, strong collaboration across the tourism sector is the key.

"There’s a lot of competition out there right now – everybody wants to travel, the world is opening up, so we got to fight hard for that attention,” she said.

Travel Manitoba expects the number of American visitors to climb back up to pre-pandemic levels by 2025.

The number of international tourists; however, isn't projected to bounce back until 2026 or 2027.