Just months after the GNWT opened the territorial border to leisure travel, tourists didn’t immediately start flowing in, but the measure was good news to operators.
Dan Wong, owner of Jackpine Paddle, said the opening of the border on March 1 gave his clients certainty they could do their extended canoe trips.
“That was important because we could have lost some people if we went through another summer of uncertainty,” he said.
Most of his clients held on to their bookings even since the first pandemic summer of 2020, when the closed border halted tourism.
“They’re trips of a lifetime that they’d been looking forward to,” said Wong.
The combination of deferred bookings and school group outings has compressed three summers worth of business into one for Jackpine, with the company running more than 20 extended expeditions lasting longer than one week.
“That’s a lot,” Wong said.
For Joe Bailey, owner of North Star Adventures in Yellowknife, the tourist volume at this point is about where he expected it would be a few months ago.
“It’s coming in slowly. It’s trickling in, I guess,” he said.
When the NWT border reopened on March 1, it was too late in the season for many tourists to book trips with North Star. But Bailey and his team’s appearance at the Rendezvous Canada Tourism Trade Show in Toronto on May 24-27 made a difference, he explained.
“We’ve had bookings from making that trip. It was good to go to that,” he said, though he couldn’t specify how many bookings were made.
While tourists might not yet be flooding his itinerary, his situation is still better than it was one year ago, when he had to sell off some company assets to pay bills due to very low numbers of bookings.
For now, the small uptick is giving Bailey optimism for the months ahead.
“We’re definitely excited for the aurora season (in August) and Mackenzie River (canoe) season next summer,” he said. “We’re in the rebuilding mode now. The doors are open and we’re taking bookings.”
At B.Dene Adventures, owner Bobby Drygeese is happy with the half dozen bookings for cultural information tours in June and July. Most of the clients are government and education groups.
But he noted that some international tourists have contacted him and cited restrictions at Canadian borders, such as vaccination requirements and completion of the ArriveCAN application for making them hesitant to book.
“About half of a dozen have said they’re waiting for things to open more,” Drygeese said.
Like Bailey, Drygeese is more positive regarding the aurora tour season that starts in August. He has already booked at least 12 clients.
But Drygeese is patient and doesn’t necessarily want a deluge of bookings, even if most restrictions have been lifted.
“There are enough Canadian clients for me because I’m a small company and it can be more personal to have small tours. You can learn more about how other people live and I can show them how First Nations people live,” he said.
A representative from NWT Tourism did not respond to inquiries on the summer season by press deadline.