This summer’s impending arrival of a cruise ship to Thunder Bay is still a go in spite of COVID-19, according to the city’s tourism manager.
Paul Pepe says Hapag-Lloyd, the Hanseatic Inspiration’s parent company, is making adjustments to worldwide cruises, such as not allowing people on board who’ve been to infected countries such as China, Hong Kong, Iran, South Korea, Macau or Italy in the last 30 days. It also includes people who have been in contact with those from those countries, or anyone who has had symptoms such as fever, chills or breathing difficulty in the last 7 days.
As for local tourism, Pepe adds he’s keeping an eye on how the international scene affects Thunder Bay.
“We’ve been making incremental investments into the UK, German markets in particular over the last number of years in partnership with Destination Northern Ontario, and Destination Ontario. And the Asian market is certainly for Thunder Bay a very small part of our market,” notes the tourism manager.
The city’s tourism manager says he’s not overly concerned due to where much of Thunder Bay’s tourism industry is focused.
“For us I think it’s really going to be about focusing on domestic travel. People are still going to be moving around, people are going to be itching to move around and explore. I’m going to be focusing a lot on our Canadian and US markets,” says Pepe.
The tourism manager also says he’s hearing from Thunder Bay operators on how business is managing.
“We certainly haven’t heard anything from the local tourism industry yet, so it doesn’t seem to be impacting peoples’ travel at this point. For consumer traffic domestically or from the US markets,” adds Pepe.
The city tourism manager points out tourism has endured through other situations including SARS from years ago.
