Nunavut’s tourism industry stagnant

SARA MINOGUE

Oodlooreak Temela saw two tourists in Kimmirut last week, but not at the Kimmik Hotel where she works as a cashier. The two young visitors from the U.K. were playing with some kids in town during a stopover on an independent kayaking trip.

“They looked like they were having a good time,” Temela said.

Like many hotels across Nunavut, the Kimmik Hotel relies on government workers, not tourists, to fill its eight rooms.

“Tourism has dropped off,” says Eric Leuthold of Polynya Adventure and Coordination in Iqaluit, who has catered to just three groups of southern tourists so far this summer. “I’ve let staff go.”

The apparent drop in tourists, still anecdotal, fits with trends in southern Canada where the tourism industry is still suffering from the triple blow of 9/11, SARS and the rising value of the Canadian dollar, which has deterred American and European visitors.

But the trend has serious consequences for Nunavut, where many people view tourism as one of the territory’s great untapped resources.

The fewer tourists there are in Nunavut, the less infrastructure there is for those who travel north.

Auyuittuq Lodge, located in Panniqtuuq, next door to Nunavut’s most famous national park, gets 60 per cent of its business from tourists, but just before press time, Donna Copeland, who runs the hotel, said there were rooms available — at the height of the tourist season.

“We’re busy, but not with tourists,” says John Jacobsen at the Discovery Lodge in Iqaluit. The Discovery also relies mainly on business travel, but Jacobsen says the hotel is seeing even fewer one-time tourists than in previous years.

Park visitations for summer 2004 are “stable” says Pauline Scott, communications manager for Parks Canada, but the numbers won’t be available until after the fall.

Meanwhile, Polynya’s Leuthold says he’s seen independent tourists who travel to Iqaluit and aren’t impressed with what they find.

“Tourists that I don’t bring up usually have more negative feedback,” Leuthold says. “They expect to see polar bears, they expect to find tours. They’re upset people don’t return their calls. Unfortunately, that’s those people’s impression of the North.”

Tourist services in Nunavut are so uneven that the most successful outfitters are those who specialize in creating exclusive Arctic experiences that bypass community infrastructure.

Craig Thomas, who manages the Bathurst Inlet Lodge in the Kitikmeot, says they’re “doing extremely well.”

About 30 per cent of visitors to the remote Arctic lodge are repeat customers, or guests who have heard about it by word of mouth.

Thomas also outfits about 500 to 600 canoeists from the U.S., Canada and Europe and says “the number of groups is up.”

“We get busier every year,” says Dave Reid of Polar Sea Adventures in Pond Inlet.

Instead of relying on general advertising, many of the 60 to 70 people who pass through Reid’s remote operation each year are repeat customers or referrals. Reid also has long-term relationships with several southern tour operators who send customers his way.

Reid operates scheduled trips from early spring to mid-September, but says that he is also doing more customized trips and specialized projects, such as outfitting a film crew from the BBC, taking a Chinese travel writer whale-watching, or organizing a giant floe-edge trip for 22 students on a special tour.

While the general market is slow, residents in Iqaluit will have noticed that there are still a lot of strangers in town — such as the energy ministers who recently traveled to Nunavut for the mine ministers conference this week.

“We find in Iqaluit, we’re getting more visitors than tourists,” says Marilyn Scott, manager of the Unikkaarvik Visitor Centre in Iqaluit.

Scott counts visitors as “friends or relatives of people who live here or people who are in town for other reasons,” such as business travel or research.

Last Wednesday, Scott said she saw 88 people walk through the centre by the beach.

“Visitors,” and locals who want to see some of the country, represent what might be the only growing market in tourism right now, and Polyna, for one, is concentrating on this market.

This summer, as with the past four years, Leuthold has offered boat trips up the Sylvia Grinnell River. He took three or four people out on evenings and weekend nearly every day during the peak three weeks of spring run-off, but “they were more people from town than tourists.”

But Leuthold says he can’t sustain this type of ongoing activity regularly.

“There’s no operation big enough to have staff waiting for unexpected tourists to call.”

Waiting for business is indeed fruitless. A staffer in the Rankin Inlet Visitor Centre says he’s seen just five people in the last two weeks.

A summer employee at the Nattinnak Centre in Pond Inlet says they’re supposed to be really busy at this time of year, but since the manager is out of town, they’re catching up on paperwork.