With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1332052
Vancouver (No. 45) and Richmond (No. 46) plunged to the bottom in the 2021 ranking. "If you think about the industry impacts from COVID-19, it makes sense," Peacock says, citing the Vancouver region's outsized reliance on tourism, hospitality and entertainment services, including large sporting events and a high concentration of bars and restau- rants. Given the pandemic-combating restrictions placed on these activities early on, he isn't surprised by the area's performance. "The pain and the difficult challenges are going to be more concen- trated in Metro Vancouver." VISITORS WANTED B.C.'s tourism industry was hit hard by travel restrictions and the closing of international borders following the onset of the pandemic. "The impact of being an international destination has been devastating," says Ingrid Jarrett, president and CEO of the British Colum- bia Hotel Association. "For the year of 2020, the occupancy we're anticipating is somewhere around 30 to 32 percent. If we look at 2019, the whole province was sitting between 70 and 80 percent." According to Jarrett, many of the trends seen in tourism mirror the results of this year's ranking: "The urban centres—Victoria, Vancouver, Richmond —those are where we're seeing the most severe impact and drop in tourism reve- nue." While the province's international destinations have seen a decline in visi- tors, other regions have benefited from an uptick in domestic travellers with nowhere else to go. "We've had some areas that have had resiliency based on B.C. resident travel…that have done quite well in the summer and into the fall," Jarrett says. These include the Okanagan Valley, the Kootenays, Tofino-Ucluelet and the Parksville-to-Courtenay corridor. Jar- rett attributes their success to comfort- able climates, family-friendly amenities, and excellent outdoor and culinary experiences. It also helps, of course, that they're traditionally less reliant on international visitors. "These areas that have done well, historically would have had less than 5 percent international travel, so their historical demand or travel pattern has not been disrupted, whereas in the rest of the province it has." NW BC 48 BCBUSINESS JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021