The President and CEO of Tourism Sun Peaks says she is “cautiously optimistic” that there will be some international visitors on the slopes during the 2021-22 ski season.
Arlene Schieven though is not holding out hope, which she says will have an impact on yet another ski season after a COVID-impacted 2020-21 season.
“The international visitors to Sun Peaks, that still likely won’t rebound too much this winter, we’re hoping maybe at the end part of the winter, but we’ll certainly be able to be more diverse than we were last winter where virtually all of our traffic was from B.C.,” she told NL News.
“Last year, we were actually only able to market to Kamloops at times whereas now we have marketing for Sun Peaks in many different markets – Washington, Oregon, California, Ontario, Alberta, all of B.C. – so we are able to encourage people to come, and we’re optimistic they will.”
The lack of international visitors, Schieven says, will be felt at certain points of the winter season when domestic travellers aren’t as plentiful.
“January has always been the month where Australians have really buoyed visitation to Sun Peaks,” she said. “Without that, when we look at the pace, its January that is hurting the most.”
“We can do our best to try and fill that with other travellers but there is no question that there will be an impact. When the Australians come and stay for a long period of time, that helps buoy the midweek visitation as well. We’ll try to counter that with mid-week specials so we’re not just busy on the weekends.”
“We’re hoping that we’ll have a much better winter than we did last year, but we don’t anticipate that we’ll have a full recovery at this time,” she added.
Schieven says Tourism Sun Peaks as well as the Resort and village businesses are banking on as stable a winter season as possible after a summer that was full of ups and downs because of COVID-19 restrictions and wildfire smoke.
“We started off with great momentum at the beginning of summer but then the fires hit, and we essentially had to close for two weeks,” she told NL News.
“Once the evacuation alert was lifted, of course, we tried to get things going again and we certainly had some bright spots in August but then the restrictions about travelling to the Interior because of COVID cases so once again we had to pause our marketing.”
“I think it would have been a phenomenal summer had we not had those two events,” she added.
Schieven says the two-week closure because of the Embleton Mountain Fire led a number of people to cancel their trips well into August.
“Even when the fire alert was gone and the smoke was gone, Sun Peaks got grouped into the whole what was happening in the Interior of B.C. [with COVID]. So yeah, it was definitely difficult to build that momentum back up. It certainly took into August where we saw some good weekend traffic on some of the days.”
Schieven says the chairlifts closed for the summer season on Sept. 26 after a “phenomenal weekend” which saw people come to Sun Peaks from across the province.
“We had a lot of people here that were riding the bike park, hiking, taking advantage of our Fall Festival. The Fall was really an end to an erratic summer,” she added.
Sun Peaks Resort is currently scheduled to open for the 2021-22 winter season in just over six weeks, on Saturday, Nov. 20.
