All things considered, Rocky Mountaineer is calling 2021 a successful year after the last train of the season left Kamloops on Friday.

This after the entire 2020 season was lost due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Senior Vice President and COO Mark Southern says it was a shorter season with operations not getting underway until July and a thinned-out the schedule at the start of the season. “But we put a full schedule in in August and September and the first part of October. Once the borders opened and the double vaccines became a thing we saw our loads start to pick up pretty nicely here at the end of the year. I am pretty sure the people of Kamloops got to see the streets start to fill up a little bit here in the last several weeks.”

Southern says normally the train operator has about 100,000 guests, but this year they had about 11,000 passengers.

“But I will say this, we were just so happy to operate, and it felt normal to operate. What we do is run trains and it was nice to be able to get our employees back, get them working and get the train up and running. So while 11,000 guests wouldn’t be a great year for us, it was great just to be able to get back up and running.”

Southern says it is very optimistic for 2022 with booking trends already showing it might get close to having normal numbers.

“While we don’t anticipate maybe getting all the way back to 100,000 guests, we are seeing booking trends that would indicate that we might get fairly close to that number for next year… We’re very optimistic about what next year is going to look like.”