Tourism finally picking up in Toronto, but we aren't close to all the way back yet

Finally, the people are coming. Back to Toronto, that is.

After two years of the COVID-19 pandemic wreaking havoc on the city’s tourism sector, most of Toronto’s major events have returned and so have visitors, especially those from across the country looking to check out all that there is to do in Canada’s biggest burg. There’s also been a nearly eight-fold rise of expats returning to Canada to visit this year, with many of those choosing Toronto specifically.

The good news is the tourism rebound has been increasing for months now and that’s expected to continue.

“Business in Toronto for the tourism and hospitality sector has definitely come back significantly. We already saw strong signs of recovery in the spring and the summer continues to bring higher occupancy rates and average daily rates in hotels, as compared to the past two years,” said Frederic Dimanche, director of the Ted Rogers School of Hospitality and Tourism Management at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Inbound international travel is still limited (due in part to federal COVID restrictions, but also, to ongoing and recurring travel bans in Asia), “but Canadians are not as fearful as they were last year to travel and to stay in cities,” Dimanche said.

Tourism brings in millions of dollars annually to Toronto, but during the pandemic, what little there was to go around amongst those willing to move about, wasn’t being spent here.

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Tourism in Toronto has picked up but there is room for more visitors. POSTMEDIA NETWORK FILES

“We’ve seen urban destinations like Toronto lag well behind other other types of destinations,” said Andrew Weir, Destination Toronto’s vice-president.

That’s because city-dwellers were mostly looking to get away from people into wide open spaces, like Muskoka.

“The demand for an urban experience was, for obvious reasons, quite low. We (the Toronto tourism sector) sell a lot of people together in the same place at the same time, and 98 years out of 100, that’s a great thing to sell,” Weir said. “But it it’s not what people want it for the last two years. It’s not what they felt comfortable with and beyond that, the things that people would come to the city for, like concerts or theatre or meetings and conventions or pro sports weren’t available. So a lot of the reasons and the motivators to come to the city didn’t even exist at all.”

Weir said that while it’s great to see downtown looking lively again and businesses packed, we aren’t yet where we were and where we need to be.

“We’re dependent on both leisure, travel, and business travel. And we’re dependent on both domestic travel and international travel. But right now, only one side of each of those coins is really firing strongly.  So leisure is relatively strong right now. But it’s domestically (especially with visitors from Southern Ontario and Quebec). So the international market hasn’t come back in a meaningful way yet,” he said.

“And business travel is only just beginning to come back. So when you when you have a diversified base of business and you’re reliant on multiple segments of business, and only some of them are active, then naturally as a destination, we haven’t returned to the level of business volumes that the city would have seen before … (The lack of Asian visitors and business conferences) is not sustainable at a destination like Toronto and the same would be true of other major urban destinations. A destination like Toronto needs that very strong base of meetings and convention and business travel to come back and that just really hasn’t returned to anywhere near full force,” Weir said.

On a positive note, Destination Toronto just held a conference of its own complete with international visitors and bookings have been coming in steadily for future conferences. But that’s off in the distance, as far away as the latter stages of this decade, since these events often are planned out well in advance (three- to seven-year windows, Weir said). “But still, that’s an important base that we get to put on the books now.”

If business travellers also eventually return to Toronto in large numbers for smaller meetings that would be a boon for the city as well. But nobody yet knows in this new world of video calls and virtual get-togethers just how much of that sector will return to the old “normal.”

“A lot of companies are still adjusting their policies and not all companies have even resumed a policy of business travel yet. So that’s that’s a big challenge. And because Toronto is such a creative hub and financial hub, it’s people aren’t traveling to meet with those other companies that happen to be based here. That’s a real loss to our economy,” he said. “Again, that’s going to take some time to resume.”

In the meantime, Weir is hopeful that Torontonians will pick up some of the slack. “When we couldn’t go anywhere else we found new places around the city we found new neighbourhoods and new restaurants and new new things to experience within our own city. I hope out of all this awfulness of COVID that one of the lasting positive legacies will be a continued sense of local exploration and discovery now that we’ve discovered all these great places within our own city,” he said. “Let’s not forget about that. Let’s keep discovering.”