National Tourism Week

Jeff Green | Apr 17, 2024

Every day of the year is the National or International Day of something or other, or more than one thing. January 23 is National Pie Day in both Canada and the United States. The date was set in the 1970s by a man in Boulder, Colorado whose birthday was on that day, and liked pie, I guess. National Pecan Pie Day is July 12, and national bubble gum wrapper day is January 31st.

You get the picture.

While the national days can be quirky and frivolous, the practice of naming national weeks is more of an institutional, promotional, enterprise. There are weeks and months devoted to raising awareness, and money, towards treatment and prevention, of dozens of different diseases and conditions. Last week was volunteer appreciation week, emergency preparedness week is coming, and June is Pride month. There are countless workplace weeks and days. There is even a newspaper week (October 6-13 this year).

Most of them are all about providing a focus for some aspect of social life that is important at all times, but might need a reason for the public to really pay attention to it.

This week is Tourism Awareness Week (April 15-19) I know that because a media release came in from Tourism Kingston about it, not surprisingly.  Tourism Kingston pegs the economic impact of tourism in Kingston at $544 million, and says that it is responsible for 9% of the Kingston workforce, a total of 15,000 “tourism related” jobs.

Tourism Kingston also takes a broad view of tourism, including not only people who come to Kingston as a tourism destination, to visit the sites, attend festivals, etc., but also those who come to visit family and friends and for business meetings.

But tourism can be a fickle thing to be dependent upon, for a small economy. The example of the April 8 eclipse, where the range of visitors to Kingston was expected to be somewhere between 70,000 and 500,000, a wide range to begin with. In the end, the numbers were not really discussed because it was a lot less than even the low end of that range. While the eclipse was a one day disappointment, COVID devastated the tourism economy, and as the Tourism Kingston release notes, the tourism numbers have improved each year since 2020 but are still well shy of where they were in 2019. They say that Kingston welcomed 1.9 million visitors in 2023, as compared to 2.7 million in 2019.

Tourism plays a major role in the Kingston economy, and that is why the City of Kingston supports Tourism Kingston, which employs at least 9 people on a full-time basis, and likely many more on a project basis.

It is harder to quantify the tourism economy in Frontenac County. For one thing, Frontenac County is not a single destination, like Kingston, because it is vast instead of compact, so it is hard to market. There are resorts sprinkled through the county that have carved their own niche as tourism businesses, some that fill up year after from June to October and then close down for the winter, and others that have cropped up to appeal to a variety of groups looking for a retreat space, but mostly the tourism economy in Frontenac has been all about the seasonal residents, cottagers.

For that reason COVID was a boon to our “tourism” economy in many ways. People used their cottages, rented out their cottages, and welcomed visitors to the cottage, in record numbers, and for longer than just the July and August boom time. That is not so much the case anymore, and the tourism season has become more narrowly focused again.

At the same time, the tourism marketing efforts that some of our local businesses have undertaken over the last ten years, have lost municipal support. Last fall, Frontenac County Council decided to retreat from tourism marketing by turning down a staffing request earmarked for destination development, and this winter North Frontenac decided to end their experiment in funding an economic development officer who was working on business and tourism promotion.

The reasons were similar. In both cases, the budget increases were larger than council members felt was reasonable, and once they had done what they could to trim the budgets for core services, the only discretionary savings available were in economic development. 

This signals that our politicians, and the ratepayers who contact them and vote for them, don't see the local tourism economy as essential. 

The grocery and convenience stores, restaurants, hardware stores and even the tradespeople who we rely on 365 days a year, would not be there for us without the seasonal boost that comes from the summer traffic.

And those businesses know they must cater to the year-round residents, and the summer traffic, in order to survive and thrive. Tourism awareness week is a reminder that our tourism economy is a necessary piece of the puzzle that makes our communities better places to live.

It has always been a summer economy and attempts to increase traffic in the shoulder seasons, even extending it to the beginning of June and the end of September, have met with mixed success at best.

The regional model of a rural tourist economy is Prince Edward County (The County) and most of us would prefer to see ourselves as "hidden and we like it that way", but we can't build a future without visitors and by supporting the businesses that cater to them, in some small way, even if we do not want to invest our tax dollars in tourism promotion