Queens County businesses hurting from lower tourism numbers in 2023
Melanie Perron, co-owner of Hell Bay Brewing in Liverpool, says she hopes summer 2024 is better than the 2023 season. (Rick Conrad photo)
By Rick Conrad
Fires, floods and downpours combined last year to keep visitors away from the South Shore, according to numbers released recently by Tourism Nova Scotia.
Hotel stays, or room nights sold, for the May to October 2023 period were down about five per cent over 2022. That compares to an overall decrease of two per cent in all of Nova Scotia. The only regions that saw more people in 2023 were the Eastern Shore and the Annapolis Valley.
The South Shore was one of the hardest hit areas of the province. Yarmouth and Acadian Shores saw the biggest drop at six per cent over 2022.
Stephanie Miller Vincent, co-ordinator of the South Shore Tourism Co-operative, says the wildfires in Barrington and Shelburne, and torrential rains and floods later in the summer conspired to keep people away from the South Shore.
“We had an odd beginning to our peak season in 2023,” she said in an interview. “We had fires in the Barrington area that shut down (Highway) 103 so folks weren’t travelling this coast. So that affected numbers.
“2023 numbers are tough to look at because we’re looking at numbers that are coming the year following a couple of years of pent-up travel demand.”
The numbers aren’t really surprising to businesses and organizations in Queens County that rely on summer tourist traffic to help float them through the rest of the year.
Melanie Perron, the co-owner of Hell Bay Brewing Company in Liverpool, says she saw a lot fewer visitors from the Maritimes last year.
“We rely so much on our patio season to bring in tourism and people from the city and other places,” Perron says.
“And it seemed like it rained every weekend so those would have been when we would have had a surplus of people coming and enjoying our beaches and our parks and then coming and stopping and having a flight (of beer) or getting beer to go. So I found our numbers were way down because of the weather.”
At the Queens County Museum, which relies partly on donations from tourists, visitor numbers dropped by more than 3,000 across its four properties over 2022. Besides the main museum, Perkins House, Fort Point Lighthouse and the Queens Museum of Justice are also part of the museum complex.
Dayle Crouse, the museum’s administrative assistant, said that despite a spike in visitors in 2022 when people were doing more post-Covid travelling, the numbers still haven’t recovered to 2019 levels.
“We found that after Covid and everybody had a little bit of freedom they really spiked and everybody was spending their dollars and going out. But then I think the next year, people really started to rein in their dollars and numbers have dropped.”
Crouse says a combination of rising gas prices, bad weather and news coverage of the wildfires contributed to the decrease.
Miller Vincent says that while tourists from outside the Maritimes tend to book their vacations six months to a year in advance, those closer to home are more spontaneous.
“As Atlantic Canadians and Maritimers we look on Wednesday and say, ‘OK, what’s the weather this weekend? Should I go or should I stay?’ And if it’s calling for rain, you’ll see those accommodation numbers not pick up where they need to be.”
Perron says she hopes 2024 brings brighter weather and more people back to the area’s beaches and the brewery’s patio.
“We usually bank on the summer to get through the winter. So our summer was so dismal that we’re just scraping by to get through the winter and hopefully we’ll have a nice sunny hot summer to bring out all the beer drinkers.”
Email: rickconradqccr@gmail.com