It appears Kelowna, B.C.’s, tourism industry is being hit hard this year.
Tourism operators are reporting a sharp decline in the number of visitors to the Central Okanagan city.
“Normally, we’d have floods of Albertans coming through. Now we’re down to maybe one a day. Also coming in from Vancouver, we’ve seen some big declines as well with travel,” said Jane Sawin, who owns Priest Creek Family Estate Winery.
Sawin said the winery is seeing about half the traffic it saw last summer.
“We’re seeing a big decline,” Sawin said. “Last summer, we would see upwards of 40 reservations on a Saturday, now I’m sitting at about eight or nine.”
While there may be a number of factors involved, including the economy and fear of wildfires, some strongly believe it’s the crackdown on short-term rentals that’s to blame.
“We’re down in our private bookings, which are the bulk of people who do stay in the short-term rental market, we’re down about 70 per cent over 2022 and 50 per cent down in that particular segment from 2023,” said Marsha Morrish with Okanagan Wine Country Tours.
“It’s pretty scary.”
Morrish said it is unusual to have many openings for wine tours during the peak tourism season when in the past, visitors had to book far in advance.
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“You could book with us tomorrow, today and it’s the same with the wineries — previously we had to book maybe three weeks in advance to get the time slots we wanted, and now we could book tomorrow,” Morrish said.
“I mean, we talk to our winery partners. They are really quiet, they’ve laid off people.”
In May, new legislation went into effect banning short-term rentals unless they are in the homeowner’s primary residence–all in an effort to ease the housing crisis.
“We support some limitations on short-term rentals but to do a blanket across the board without any exemptions makes no sense,” said B.C. United leader Kevin Falcon, who is visiting the Okanagan. “They jammed that legislation through and unfortunately, we’re now seeing the results.”
But B.C.’s housing minister is not backing down.
“We have right now in the community vacancy rate of I believe about 1.5 per cent. That means there are a lot of people struggling to find accommodation,” said Ravi Kahlon.
“There’s a lot of people struggling to find a place to live, and people want to live in the region, and that is our priority. Short-term rentals are still available in the community. But we want to make sure that full homes are available for families in our community.”
Global News reached out to a handful of tourism operators in the downtown core and all reported a decrease in tourists this season.
Operators of Priest Creek winery said they hoped for a better balance between a healthy housing supply and robust tourism industry.
“I think the government needs to take a real hard look at the decisions that they’ve just made,” Sawin said. “It definitely has created a new, bigger problem for our industry.”
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