With the height of tourism season approaching, the Kamloops Accommodation Association is eager for what is to come.
With events slowly returning after two years of restrictions, KAA President Angela Tasker says it is a good sign for hotels and motels in the area.
“I think its looking good, we always have a little thing in the back of our minds since COVID wiped us out before, but it does look very positive, we are seeing sports coming back, tourists coming back, on top of that conferences started back which is awesome.”
She says the uptick in hotel occupancy filling is good news following the pandemic stresses.
“Its important for us because we’ve got some recovery so we have some time to make up here. We had a couple of years where there was a lot of debt (that) occurred in some of the hotels so we’re hoping this is the start of something that is going to continue because we need to have a come back for sure.”
When asked if there is a concern about the lack of hotel-motel space in Kamloops, Tasker suggests there could be a concern over a long weekend such as August long.
“Typically and historically have been high demand weekends for the city and I think the Powwow is coming back that weekend too which is super exciting so that would be a busy one, so there is availability in the city on different dates so we don’t want people to think ‘Kamloops is full and don’t come’ because we absolutely still have room, we have lots of hotels and a decent amount of inventory.”
However, she says the grey line now is having enough “qualified staff” to help host the uptick of guests in the area.
“There’s definitely struggles around around that in the hospitality sector, we did lose some people during COVID because so many people did get laid off and and found different passions so we are working on that pretty hard at this point in time.”
She adds that things are in the works to improve communication with emergency services for fire season.
“We work in the background at this point with work being don’t to work with ESS and have a better communication tool that works with our industry and emergency services so that we are very nimble and can work with very quick to have them.”
