Is Booming Tour Business A Sign Of Wine Industry Recovery?
HALIFAX — The economic recovery from Covid-19 has not been equal. While some sectors have bounced back fairly quickly, others have not.
That’s particularly true for the tourism sector, where travel restrictions are keeping tourists away for a second season, leaving many businesses in dire straits.
But one sector of the tourism economy may be bucking that trend, at least partially.
Susan Downey Lim owns and runs Grape Escapes Nova Scotia Wine Tours. She says business at her wine tour company has been booming.
“Our bookings are definitely way up — like, way up. They can even compare to pre-pandemic like 2019,” she says.
Downey Lim says business is so good right now she is even chartering vehicles from other companies to accommodate her demand.
She’s also having trouble booking appointments at wineries, where she says space is filling up fast—especially on the weekend.
Part of what’s driving Downey Lim’s trouble does stems from the fact that social distancing rules are still in place in the province. That means wineries can’t accommodate as many people as they could pre-pandemic. She also can’t run her tours at full capacity.
“We’re still running a lot of public tours with a lot of empty seats,” she says.
Even taking that into account, however, Downey Lim says her numbers for the year are impressive.
She says she already has nearly the same number of bookings lined up for August this year as she had in 2019, and there’s still more coming in.
The province’s wineries, meanwhile, are seeing business start to return, just not yet back to pre-pandemic levels.
Simon Rafuse is the winemaker at Blomidon Estate Winery. He says weekends at Blomidon “have been very, very busy” but that business can be slow during the week.
That’s because most of the winery’s typical weekday traffic is vacationers from places like Quebec and Ontario
“It’s just those people who, you know, are here on vacation and they’ll come to visit a winery on a Tuesday – that’s what we’re kind of missing,” he says.
The good news, he says, is that locals are picking up some of the slack. In fact, he says Blomidon is seeing more Nova Scotians come through in 2021 than it has in years.
“I think people are starting to look around and see what they can do here locally. And that’s great because without the local support I think it would be a bunch of more dire situations,” he says.
Downey Lim agrees. Although the opening of the provincial borders has meant a “huge spike” in bookings from the valuable Quebec and Ontario markets, most of her business this year is still coming from locals.
In a normal year, Downey Lim says about half of her clients would be from outside the province. This year, it’s only about 30 percent.
She guesses Nova Scotians that have been locked down for more than a year want to get out but might not yet be ready to travel abroad. Instead, they’re using their newly granted freedom to explore their province.
Couple that with marketing from Tourism Nova Scotia pushing people to “staycation” and a growing interest in the province’s food and wine culture, and you have way more locals booking wine tours.
Rafuse says he’s optimistic about the rest of the season because late summer tends to be the busiest time for wineries.
By then, he guesses the borders will have been open long enough that people will have had time to book vacations. And people want to visit Nova Scotia wineries, he says.
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