Although firm attendance numbers haven’t been totalled up yet, the Festival du Voyageur is considering the 2023 event a success.
Executive director Darrel Nadeau told 680 CJOB’s Connecting Winnipeg he’s pleasantly surprised with this year’s turnout and that the day-to-day numbers that have been tallied are higher than they were pre-pandemic.
Western Canada’s largest winter festival came back with a bang after pandemic-enforced hybrid events each year since the last full edition in 2020.
“We’re pleased to see that we had a slightly higher audience than our last in-person edition, so we had a really successful year in our opinion,” Nadeau said.
In addition to bringing back a full in-person festival after three long years of waiting, Nadeau said the festival made some adjustments this year to make things easier for attendees to maximize their fun at the nine-day celebration of all things franco-Manitoban.
Get daily Winnipeg news
“We had a new ticketing system this year and we had higher capacity, so we are able to accommodate more festivalgoers, but still reduce lineups — which I think is the ideal for folks,” he said.
“They want to be able to go from tent to tent not have to wait in line, and explore all of our programming.
“That’s why we had five venues all going at once. We want(ed) everyone to explore them.”