2022 a good year for tourism in Lethbridge

By Alejandra Pulido-Guzman - Lethbridge Herald on May 4, 2023.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDapulido@lethbridgeherald.com

Last year was a good one for tourism in the city.
Tourism Lethbridge recently presented city council acting as Economic Standing Policy Committee its year-end report and CEO Erin Crane says 2022 was a good year for tourism.
“Coming out of the pandemic, we know we still have a really long way to go, but we started to see some of those numbers return to where they had been back in 2019, so we know that recovery is happening,” said Crane.
She said even though 2022 started with some pandemic restrictions still in place, they came off just before the Tim Horton’s Brier and that brought in a lot of tourism and revenue to Lethbridge.
“The economic impact for tourism that we saw here in Lethbridge was over $57 million,” said Crane.
 She said thanks to the Brier and the Alberta Treaty Hockey provincials and then all of the other sport organizations started to host more events, some of the business events came back and all of that added to that total amount of $57 million.
“Another side of that is that we’re getting better at tracking, and that’s a big part of what our office is doing.  We are trying to find out what’s happening in the community and putting that into an economic impact calculator that we have, so that helps us generate that number,” said Crane.
 She said Tourism Lethbridge started using that calculator tracking in 2022 even though the economic multiplier they used to create the calculator was actually created years ago by some of the provincial and national organizations for Lethbridge.
 “We’ve been using it for quite a few years, it does need to be updated. That’s something that we’re looking at doing this year. There are other ways that we can track some of that, but for right now it gives us a good standard to use,” said Crane.  
She said one of the ways they track tourism is by the numbers provided by organizations holding events around town. She gave the example of the Winter Light Festival at Nikka Yuko Japanese Gardens, and said that once they get the total attendance numbers, they use that to calculate the economic impact.
“What we track is the visitor numbers because that’s what brings that tourism economic impact to it. We do use a formula, we take 10 per cent for those events, because we find that that’s a standard,” said Crane.
She said right now, sporting events have the biggest impact on tourism.
“Sports is definitely one of our biggest economic drivers. Sports for our area is really popular. We are putting together a standardized strategy for sports, how do we go after them? what do we need to go after? in order to make the biggest bang for our buck,” said Crane.
She said even though sports have been playing a big role in tourism, the opening of the Agri-Food Hub will have a significant impact.
“I think it is going to be catalytic, it is going to change our entire landscape. We have bid on business events in the past, and one of the things that has held us back from posting a lot of the things that I think are really important to Lethbridge and area, is because we didn’t have the venue size and the capability to host,” said Crane.
 She said the Agri-Food Hub will change that, allowing local bids on high-level events.
 “This opens up that opportunity to host not only national major events, but international events that we never would have had an opportunity to host before, and I think that’s one of the biggest opportunities for us,” said Crane.
She said a good example is the Canadian Seed Growers and the Canola Growers of Canada, which could bring between 750 to 1,000 people while the old Exhibition facilities only have the capacity for 500.
“Any conference that was above and beyond that, we couldn’t even bid on and now this whole new area has opened up to us which is really exciting. We still have a lot of work to do because we still have the same number of hotel rooms that we always had, so with the new capacity opening up of the Agri-Food trade hub and Trade Centre, that needs to change as well,” said Crane.  

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