Busy cruise ship season expected to help struggling Vancouver businesses

For the first time in more than three years, the cruise ship season is alive and well in Vancouver and it couldn’t come at a better time for shop and restaurant owners.

Many admit they need a financial boost from all the tourists that are expected to roll into the city this summer.

May’s schedule is jampacked. There’s only one day when there isn’t a ship docked at the port.

The Port of Vancouver says more than 330 cruises are scheduled between April and October. As many as 1.3 million people are expected to arrive in the downtown core during the height of the season, which runs from May to September.

Walley Wargolet, the executive director of the Gastown Business Improvement Association, says this is really good news.

“The importance of having lots of folks in the neighbourhood, opening up their wallets and spending a lot of money is really imperative if we’re going to survive this bounce back from where we were.”

“It’s really, really important for us to have a solid tourist season this year.”

He admits many businesses in the area are barely turning a profit if they’re making money at all.

“Especially with some of the economic uncertainty we’re dealing with right now. We also have increased property taxes [and] minimum wage is going up next month. We have a federal excise tax impacting liquor sales, so there’s a lot of things working against the business community,” explained Warglolet, who adds others are also paying back federal business loans received during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wargolet says all the tourists are expected to bring in millions of dollars for the local economy.

“It’s really, really important for us to have a solid tourist season this year. You don’t need to spend a lot of money, each person, in order to have such a positive, economic boon to the neighbourhood.”

Wargolet adds business improvement associations in Vancouver recently did a survey and discovered about one-third of businesses were considering closing for good because of the ongoing financial challenges, so now more than ever, the tourism dollars are being welcomed.

“Honestly, we’re talking literally life and death for some of our businesses. If we don’t have a solid tourism season, we could be losing some folks here, not only in Gastown, but throughout the City of Vancouver.”

He says weekends in Gastown have been picking up steam lately, but the weekdays are bare.

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“Monday through Wednesday has not been very solid. We still don’t have our office folks back, so we’ve had quite a few of our restaurants stop serving lunches… where some folks are staying closed on Mondays or not opening for lunches until the weekends, and all of those things are having a real negative impact on the bottom lines for a lot of our businesses. You need to have those dollars coming in, in order to survive,” he noted.

Royce Chwin, president and CEO of Destination Vancouver, says the cruise ship season has a significant impact on the city.

“Consider each ship has about a $3 million impact locally in Vancouver, so it is a big deal. Couple that with 2023 being the first full year of tourism back, it’s a much-needed boost for Vancouver’s visitor economy for sure.”

He says this year’s cruise season is one of the best they’ve seen in years. “We have an eight per cent increase in ships coming in port this year, and that was based on 2022 numbers, which was a record.”

Chwin says tourism dollars don’t just mean a boost for eateries and retailers, saying it’s much more than that.

“Part of the business of tourism… but all the supplies required to reset a ship. So, the food, all the beverages, whether local labour is used to help support the ship while it’s at port, so there are a number of other economic impacts.”

He says tourism was flatlined during the height of the pandemic and its restrictions, but now there’s a real chance to rebound.

“We lost somewhere between $5 billion to $7 billion in economic impact just here in Vancouver. Considering the size of our visitor economy for the Lower Mainland, it was about $15 billion in 2019 and we were less than a third of that, so 2023 being the first full year back with cruise ships coming back in record numbers… is really important for Vancouver to get back on our feet again.”

Chwin reassures the public that many of the amenities and businesses that could see a boost from tourists are also fully staffed, an improvement on what was a major labour shortage during the pandemic. However, he admits, more work needs to be done in that area.

–With files from Greg Bowman