A report released earlier this week indicates that it will be a couple of years before Ontario’s indigenous tourism sector recovers to pre-pandemic levels.
The report, released Tuesday, was commissioned by Indigenous Tourism Ontario (ITO), the provincial organization that supports the growth of the Indigenous tourism industry.
The 34-page report is titled COVID-19 Impact Assessment on Ontario’s Indigenous Tourism Industry.
The report indicates that the indigenous tourism industry in Ontario will only partially recover in 2022 and that it will take until 2023 to reach the levels of GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and employment in 2019, the year before the pandemic began to have impacts. significant in Canada.
The report was prepared by MDB Insight, a company with various specialties, including providing market research solutions and supporting tourism and economic development initiatives.
ITO CEO Kevin Eshkawkogan said his organization had made its own projections on the impacts of the pandemic after collecting data in March and April 2020.
“We project a loss of $ 330 million to the tourism industry and GDP,” he said, adding that ITO officials felt the pandemic would also result in the loss of around 4,000 jobs in the indigenous tourism sector in the province. Approximately 13,000 people worked in Ontario’s indigenous tourism sector in 2019.
Eshkawgogan said it was beneficial for a third party to do its own research on the industry at the provincial level.
“They basically validated our projections,” he said. “They were doing quite well with the loss of jobs.”
The report also basically doubled ITO’s projected losses. In 2019, the indigenous tourism sector in Ontario contributed around $ 650 million to GDP.
The report found that the pandemic had caused a loss of around $ 332 million in GDP in 2020.
MDB Insight joined in early 2021 to conduct its research and prepare a report.
Like ITO officials, Eshkawkogan said the representatives who prepared the report cannot provide an exact number of how many indigenous tourism companies in the province have closed their doors forever due to the impacts of the pandemic.
“We don’t know how many are permanently closed or if they are temporarily closed,” he said. “They couldn’t locate our members. That’s the problem now. “
Eshkawkogan said ITO officials understand that some of the companies that operated in the indigenous tourism sector will not return.
“We know that some commercial operators have moved on to other things,” he said.
Eshkawkogan added that not all indigenous tourism operators in the province have faced significant impacts during the pandemic.
“It really depends on the sector,” he said. “Restaurants suffered a kick. They really got hurt. But some hotels made it amazing. It really depends on the business. “
Eshkawkogan also said that impacts on the industry varied from community to community. This is because some First Nations closed their communities during the pandemic for extended periods and did not allow visits. Some are still closed.
However, other indigenous communities had some restrictions, but some companies were still able to welcome non-members.
The ITO-commissioned report on how long recovery efforts will take paints a much more optimistic picture than Keith Henry, president and CEO of the Indigenous Tourism Association of Canada (ITAC), shared publicly a couple of months ago.
In September, Henry said that information gathered from Destinations Canada and its partners suggested that it would take until 2028, and possibly even 2030, before the indigenous tourism industry fully recovered from the impacts of the pandemic.
However, Eshkawkogan is confident that the recovery in Ontario will be much faster than in other parts of the country.
“In Ontario, from what they tell us, we will be at the forefront because of the work that we have done,” he said.
Eshkawkogan said there are numerous indigenous tourism operators in the southern part of the province that will contribute greatly to a faster recovery period.
“The southern Ontario markets are huge,” he said. “That particular market for the indigenous tourism market is really good.”
Eshkawkogan also believes that ITO officials still have a lot of work to do.
“We have to rebuild consumer confidence,” he said. “We also have to rebuild the confidence of the tour operators.”
By Sam Laskaris, Reporter for the Local Journalism Initiative, Windspeaker.com
Reference-ygknews.ca