ROB MURRAY: I’m speaking with Banff Mayor Karen Sorenson and Leslie Bruce from Banff & Lake Louise Tourism. Back in April, just as the COVID-19 pandemic was just starting to get underway, an Economic Task Force was formed in Banff, really with no idea of what the summer would look like. I understand that the progress report has been released this week?

KAREN SORENSEN: We do a really great job here working together. Nobody really operates in a silo. The four organizations – the Town of Banff, Banff & Lake Louise Tourism, Parks Canada, and the Banff and Lake Louise Hospitality Association came together very quickly. The pandemic has been devastating to our economy. We really worked to try to make sure that Albertans and Canadians felt safe coming to our destination even while the pandemic was happening.

RM: The summer was pretty outstanding, I think, all things considered.

LESLIE BRUCE: We’re very grateful for the summer we had. We were able to keep our community safe, keep our visitors safe, and gradually increase visitation while supporting more businesses in their reopening. When you compare our results to other destinations across this country, we have performed extremely well with respect to a hotel occupancy and restaurant revenue per seat. We still are limited by capacity. That was still a major constraint for many businesses, but the overarching sentiment from our membership was it went a lot better than they had anticipated at the beginning of the summer.

RM: The first four of the five objectives for the task force – safely reopen the destination, welcome visitors to Banff National Park, protect the destination’s brand reputation ,and coordinate communications to stakeholders. Are there any key takeaways from those four points that you wanted to highlight here today?

LB: We’ve had a lot of positive outcomes from this. One of the most important takeaways is how well we work together and how impctful we are when we work together as a community.

KS: We know that visitors and residents felt quite safe in our destination. We also know that what Banff, Lake Louise, and Banff National Park offer is the kind of experience that visitors were looking for to get an escape from their urban living. We’re very pleased with the objectives, particularly around keeping people safe.

RM: Let’s talk about that fifth objective – seek opportunities to test future sustainable approaches. I understand that the committee is still meeting and that’s a goal you’re working towards as well?

LB: We had the opportunity to test a pedestrian zone on Banff Avenue. We had the opportunity to really explore a more fulsome cycling approach on the Bow Valley Parkway. These are things that we think should and can be evaluated for part of our future.

KS: This opportunity to test future sustainable approaches has been a silver lining. We’re just discussing Bear Street for the winter. We’re going to assure that there is a pedestrian friendly zone on Bear Street. The Parks Canada recent announcement about the panel to advise on a long-term framework to move visitors generally around Banff National Park has in some ways been an outcome of understanding that we need to and have an opportunity to do things a little bit differently in Banff National Park. From a council perspective, we’re going to be meeting very quickly here before the end of the year to talk about summer 2021 and understanding that things like social distancing and perhaps limitations on businesses are still going to be a very real possibility. We want to make sure that everybody’s in the conversation and prepared well in advance for what summer 2021 might look like.

RM: Just backing up a second here – does that mean that Bear Street will be open in some capacity soon?

KS: It will be open in some capacity soon. We do want to allow for the parking opportunities that are on Bear Street. I actually haven’t seen the final plan – council will be seeing that, I believe, at the next council meeting, but there will also be a section of that street that will be pedestrian only. The intention is to have some fires and some outdoor space. I think Banff & Lake Louise Tourism is providing us with some Christmas trees. We do want to create an outdoor winter feel that people will not have cars around them, feel safe, and enjoy the winter.

RM: You were mentioning going into next summer, and I think that’s pretty relevant point because we did safely reopened the destination. Some of the objectives of the task force have been completed to some extent, but it sounds like there’s still more work to do and the mandate for the task force itself is still very relevant today.

LB: We know that we have been successful at safely reopening. We now need to work towards staying open. We have a pressing need, as COVID cases increase in the province, to keep people safe. It is very difficult to close down an economy and reopen it and we never want to do that. We will be re-looking at our objectives to make sure that they’re still relevant or looking at how we will need to evolve them. We absolutely see the value and the need to continue working together. The economic forecasts that Banff & Lake Louise Tourism are using project that we won’t return to revenue levels of 2019 until roughly 2023 or 2024. We know that we have a long road ahead of us and it’s going to take significant effort and collaboration in order to support people through that.

KS: We are not out of the woods on this. We are concerned about our economy and we continue to be very concerned about everybody’s health and safety. We all know we’ve seen a significant jump in cases in major centers in Alberta, but we also expect the number of cases to increase in Banff. If anyone has any COVID symptoms – cough, fever, shortness of breath, runny nose – you must stay home, self-isolate, and get a COVID test. I think our country, our province, and our community has really done all we can to help our workforce. There are federal support programs to provide financial aid if people miss work because they have to stay home, and we’re begging you to do so. We urge, and perhaps a stronger word is ‘beg’, listeners to remain vigilant about following safety measures. So much depends on our success at continuing to keep cases low in our destination.

Filed under: Banff, Banff Lake Louise Tourism, covid-19