BY GLEN SCHAEFER
THE PROVINCE
It’s not just the record crowds of tourists who are lining up these days at Granville Island Public Market — international airline crews jockey for spots on Vancouver-bound flights with an eye to bringing home a taste of B.C.
As the city heads toward its best year ever for tourism, fish seller Scott Moorehead has been kept busy. Among those picking up fresh salmon packed for travel at his Longliner Seafoods are Lufthansa employees.
“Lufthansa flies into Vancouver every day and all their flight crews, they’re down almost every day, buying fish for us to pack,” said Moorehead, who has been selling fish at Granville Island for 30 years.
“Vancouver is one of the most popular stops — crews put their names in to come to Vancouver and they might only get here two or three times in a season.”
The German airline’s staff in turn point their passengers to Moorehead’s shop, where fresh salmon is packed with frozen gel packs, giving visitors 40 hours to get their bounty home.
Abundant fresh seafood is one of the attractions — alongside the mountains, fresh air and water — that has increasingly put Vancouver on the international travel map.
Scott Moorehead of Longliner Seafoods at Granville Island Market with a halibut. He says Vancouver is a destination for flight crews from around the world who rarely get the chance to pick up wild seafood back home. (Arlen Redekop, PNG)
It’s one of the reasons why Condé Nast Traveler magazine put Vancouver on its 2014 list of top 10 food destinations. Many tourists are pleased to find wild seafood at all, getting only the farmed stuff back home.
“You don’t have to go very far from Vancouver before you get away from the wild salmon,” Moorehead said. “Even people from Los Angeles — you’d think that place would have everything — they come up here and, ‘Oh my God, there’s so much produce, so much seafood.’”
It’s now clear that Vancouver will host a record number of visitors this year, boosted by an upturn in the U.S. economy, the Canadian dollar’s drop in value and continued traffic from Europe and Asia.
Take a hike on any of the North Shore trails and you’ll hear a babel of languages, and it’s nearly impossible to walk downtown without stepping into someone’s vacation snaps.
“Our indications are we should finish 2015 and say, ‘Yes, absolutely, that’s the best summer ever,’” said Ty Speer, CEO and president of Tourism Vancouver.
“In general, our key markets are looking at good economic times.”
As of the end of May, U.S. visitors were up 8.1 per cent over the same period in 2014, itself a record year. Asia-Pacific visitors were up 4.6 per cent, while those from Europe increased 5.8 per cent. More than three million visitors came to the city from January to May.
Final numbers haven’t yet been crunched on the effects of another major boost to visitor numbers in June and early July, the FIFA Women’s World Cup, but Speer estimated that the games played in Vancouver drew visitor numbers in the six figures.
“What we know is, we had a huge number of people in the stadium for U.S. matches,” he said. “We know our Japanese numbers were up, with the Japanese team playing several matches, including the final.”
On July 5, the day of the Women’s World Cup Final, downtown hotels were 99 per cent full.
Eduardo Ferreira and Erica Andrade, tourists from Brazil, take a selfie at the Stanley Park totems in Vancouver this week. (Gerry Kahrmann, PNG)
FORGING A GLOBAL IDENTITY
All of which gets one to wondering: Is Vancouver simply enjoying a general rise in global tourism fuelled by better economic times, or is the city itself becoming one of those recognizable destinations, a place with its own distinctive character that is a draw in itself?
Ask a random sampling of visitors what they knew about the city before coming here, and most will mention the 2010 Winter Olympics as the event that put the city on their radar.
They’ll talk about the proximity of ocean and mountains to a major metropolitan area — not a lot of other places offer the chance to take a transit bus to the edge of the wilderness.
Swiss visitor Silvana Beer lives outside Zurich and knows something about mountains, but said Vancouver is unique for being a major city so close to the peaks.
“There is a mix between city and mountains and I really love that,” the 22-year-old Beer said, pausing during a bike tour of the city. “We don’t have big cities like this.”
The mix of urban and natural is what helps Vancouver’s summer-long Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival, with its Vanier Park seaside venue, draw nearly 10 per cent of its 100,000 annual audience from out of town.
“No matter where you travel in the world, you’ll find Shakespeare festivals,” said Bard marketing manager Heather Kennedy.
“What you won’t find is a Shakespeare festival situated at the water’s edge, a 10-minute walk from downtown, with a backdrop of the mountains, the ocean and the sky … If you take a look around at Bard on a typical night and listen to the accents, you’ll hear voices from all around the world.”
Another identifier is the yoga culture and those ubiquitous, snug outfits from Vancouver-based clothing empire Lululemon.
Saturday marked the fourth annual running of the Lululemon-sponsored SeaWheeze half-marathon, which draws half of its 10,000 runners from out of town. This year’s run through downtown and Stanley Park sold out in less than an hour.
Shakespeare festivals are everywhere around the world, but how many have a setting like Bard on the Beach? (Photo Blimp files)
CONVENTION APPROACH
Speer said Tourism Vancouver has leveraged the assets built for the Olympics — in particular the Convention Centre West beside Canada Place — to push the city’s profile in the international convention market. The World Congress of Dermatology drew 10,000 people in June, while 6,000 people attended the International AIDS Society conference in July.
Several thousand people were in Vancouver this past week for the International Academy of Management, and among upcoming conventions later this year is one on diabetes in November, expected to draw about 15,000 people.
Dutch visitors Bob Walrave and Sharon Dolmans were in the city for the management convention, and said they wouldn’t have gone to the event if it hadn’t been held in Vancouver.
“People often told me it was a beautiful city,” said Walrave, 33, as the pair watched seaplanes take off and land west of the convention centre. “It was a place you should visit once in your life at least.”
Dolmans, 30, said they toured the U.S. for a month before coming to Vancouver. “It feels safe, it feels European,” she said. “I don’t know if the Canadians like it when we say that. We really like the food here, and the people.”
Snow-capped mountains form a scenic backdrop as visitors take in the views from a platform atop the Sea to Sky Gondola near Squamish. (Jonathan Hayward, CP files)
THE LOCAL EXPERIENCE
The Sea to Sky Gondola, which climbs up the slopes of Mount Habrich just south of Squamish, helped put the town on the New York Times’ list of 52 places to go in 2015.
But visitors to the attraction, which opened in May 2014, will find themselves among locals. This isn’t a theme park, said Sea to Sky manager Kirby Brown.
The gondola takes visitors up 885 metres to a network of trails leading further upwards, to the mountain’s summit, and to nearby Shannon Falls. There’s a restaurant and a suspension bridge at the top, but the idea is to keep the place close to nature, Brown said.
The visitor mix in the gondola’s first year of operations has been slightly more than half Lower Mainland locals and the rest tourists.
“We’ll see several hundred thousand people this year — our busy days can be two to three thousand people, but there’s enough of a variety in hiking trails and viewpoints that people can spread out,” Brown said. “It’s not about the bells and whistles, it’s about keeping it clean and pristine so that people can really get that sense of how big our backyard is here.”
The gondola is drawing about 20 per cent more people this year over its first year, despite smoke from forest fires that slowed visits in July.
“As soon as the weather is nice, people come up. We’re a pure sightseeing and hiking product. When the weather is good for those two things, people come in droves.”
Brown considered that question about whether Vancouver and its surroundings is establishing a distinct identity.
“I think Vancouver is growing into its own skin,” he said. “It can be comfortable in being a fun place and being dramatically beautiful. It has natural assets that the rest of the world is envious of. People want to connect with the natural environment in a way that’s simple and organic.”
Added Tourism Vancouver’s Speer: “We don’t want to grow tourism volume solely for volume’s sake … This is not a resort destination and we don’t want to be that. We want tourists to come here and really appreciate what’s going on in Vancouver. This is not a theme park-type experience; you get what locals do.”
The Women’s World Cup this summer drew fans from around the globe, further boosting Vancouver’s international reputation forged by the 2010 Winter Olympics. (Mark van Manen, PNG files)
‘SAFE … CLEAN … FRIENDLY’
At Longliner Seafoods, Moorehead remembers an earlier boom in tourism from Japan 10 years ago that had him taking night courses in Japanese.
“They’d open their wallets — it would be full of money and they’d have to bring gifts back for everybody,” he said.
An economic collapse there killed that business for a time. But Japanese tourist visits to Vancouver have rebounded in the past two years, rising more than 10 per cent each year.
Moorehead has been seeing a lot of American faces, as well as tourists from the rest of Canada, in a tide that started peaking back in May.
“Whether it’s the combination of the weather, the low dollar, or whatever, this is the biggest year for us on Granville Island for tourists,” he said. “Vancouver’s just become a really popular tourist destination — safe place to travel, it’s clean, everybody’s pretty friendly.
“When you live here you can take it for granted, but when you go where the tourists go — Grouse Mountain, Granville Island — it’s pretty obvious why they’re coming.”
VANCOUVER TOURISM: FAST FACTS
• Nearly nine million people visited Vancouver in 2014, the highest number in the city’s history.
• The city’s top five visitor sources are Canada, the U.S., China, the U.K. and Australia, in order of number of travellers. China bumped the U.K. from third position in 2013.
• There are approximately 24,000 hotel rooms in Metro Vancouver, with about 12,000 in the downtown core.
• Daily hotel occupancy in downtown Vancouver for the month of July 2015 was more than 90 per cent, except for five days. On July 5, the day of the Women’s World Cup Final at B.C. Place Stadium, hotel occupancy peaked at 99 per cent.
• Tourism contributes approximately $6.1 billion to the Metro Vancouver economy annually and provides more than 66,000 full-time jobs. Tourism is B.C.’s third largest industry by employment.
• Vancouver had a higher hotel occupancy and average daily room rate than Toronto and Montreal between January and June 2015. Vancouver is on par with Los Angeles for occupancy and higher than L.A., Portland and Seattle for average daily rate.
• Vancouver gets more than 230 cruise ship calls annually. Each cruise ship stimulates more than $2 million in economic activity.
— Source: Tourism Vancouver
gschaefer@theprovince.com
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