Despite COVID-19, more people made overnight trips to Kelowna in June and July than for the same months last year.
According to Tourism Kelowna, July saw a 35-per cent increase in overnight total visitor trips.
“We technically had record-breaking visitation,” Tourism Kelowna president Lisanne Ballantyne said.
However, hotel occupancy rates are still down from 2019.
“What we are assuming, and we’ll be testing this, is that we’ve got many, many people coming on vacation who are choosing to stay with friends and family, who might be staying at a campground, or in an RV in their friends’ backyard,” Ballantyne said.
Traveller behaviour is changing too: people are taking shorter trips and only booking a couple of days ahead of time, Ballantyne said.
“That causes some real changes for staffing, scheduling and just trying to serve the guests to the best of our abilities,” she added.
“I think people want to travel. There is pent-up demand to travel, and people are sitting on that family vacation budget, but not until they feel safe…are they actually making that to go and spend a couple days away from home,” Ballantyne said.
In a recent survey, the organization asked more than 700 residents how they feel about welcoming tourists to the Okanagan.
The results showed that two-thirds of locals are happy to welcome regional visitors to Kelowna.
While only one in five people welcome international travelers, that number drops to eight per cent if the visitor is coming from the U.S., according to the survey.
“America’s one of the hotspots obviously right now, and they have a lot of problems with COVID, and so that’s concerning obviously, just to know that. They shouldn’t be here,” local resident Natascha Sprenger said.
Since the end of June, 171 cases have been linked to the Kelowna COVID cluster, a spike in cases largely attributed to out of town visitors.
The survey found that the sudden case increase led to lower levels of comfort in welcoming back visitors.
“That really opened a lot of people’s eyes in Kelowna, I think, just because we had that spike,” local resident Lindsay Notte said.
After the spike, hotel bookings and inquiries immediately dropped off, Ballantyne said.
“That only lasted a couple of weeks, and then the inquiries started coming back up,” Ballantyne said. “People started wanting to come back and visit again, so I think what that shows us is that we’ve got a resilient destination here.”
After hotel occupancy levels hit an all-time low of less than 12 per cent in April, they’ve rebounded to 70 per cent in July.
According to statistics from Tourism Kelowna, more than two thirds of those visitors are from within B.C.