‘Partnerships and collaborations’ a recipe for increasing Nunavut travel sector

The Nunavut travel industry directly employs more than 5,400 Nunavummiut, representing close to $335 million in employment income and nearly $50 million in revenue in the territory.

However, the sector can do better through industry and government “partnerships and collaboration,” according to delegates and organizers of the 2025 Travel Nunavut conference and annual general meeting, which wrapped three days of discussion at Iqaluit’s Aqsarniit hotel Thursday.

Derek Elias, business development officer with KIA, said this week’s Travel Nunavut conference “opened his eyes” to the economic potential of tourism. (Photo by Daron Letts)

“It really opened up my eyes as to the amount of tourism that the territory of Nunavut has and then can grow,” said Derek Elias, business development officer with the Kitikmeot Inuit Association, who travelled from Cambridge Bay to attend.

“We’re hoping that with good partnerships and collaborations that we can really make the territory of Nunavut a good tourism destination.”

Elias’s optimism and eagerness is the kind of consensus organizers sought to achieve at the conference, whose theme this year was “Nunavut’s travel industry by the numbers: Our strengths, our opportunities.”

Those numbers, shared by organizers, suggest local industries benefitting most from the travel sector include transportation, accommodation and food, and retail trade — each sharing close to a quarter of the pie — with financial services claiming a little more than five per cent of the remaining gross output impacts.

In light of the potential for growth, Travel Nunavut chairperson Ed Romanowski wants Nunavummiut to reconsider their view of what travel means, because current assumptions “shortchange Inuit,” he said in an interview.

“We keep on thinking that [the travel industry represents] only a small segment that is leisure travel,” he said. “How about the people that travel for health, people who travel for sports, people that travel for government, people that travel for all the different forms of tourism?”

According to this big-tent approach, “almost one in three jobs is somehow related to the travel industry,” he said.

In his other role as president of Nunastar Properties Inc., the company that owns the Frobisher Inn in Iqaluit, Romanowski said he would be out of a job if it weren’t for government conferences and meetings, health travel, visiting friends and relatives, and business travel.

“The leisure segment is small,” he concluded.

The cruise industry, on the other hand, is all leisure all the time, and there’s room to grow its benefits for Inuit, several delegates said.

Various speakers representing the cruise industry brainstormed about partnerships between cruise lines and hamlet economic development officers like Elias, with a goal of luring more curious travellers off the ships and into local cultural events and art markets.

On dry land, they can learn about Inuit culture and contribute to local economies by purchasing more high-end souvenirs handcrafted by Inuit artists and artisans, they said.

With files from Arty Sarkisian