Tourism Kamloops sent out a survey at the end of May and one of the topics was to find out how Kamloopsians feel about visiting local businesses.
Over one thousand people responded to the survey.
While on the NL Morning News, Tourism Kamloops CEO, Beverly DeSantis said one positive the questionnaire showed was the number of people willing to start getting out. “Travelling within BC was 66 percent, the highest one.”
“Funny enough getting a haircut, 62 percent was number two 61 percent so that’s encouraging that people are wanting to move at least within our province and support our province.”
The survey listed one of the main issues for people is their own personal safety. “Their largest concern by a very good margin, 70 percent about other patron not complying with safety guidelines and then blow that the second one was large crowds and the third was businesses not complying with safety measures.”
DeSantis addressed the people that weren’t all that enthused with visiting businesses. “The next obvious question is well what would make you more comfortable? 90 percent was hand washing and sanitize stations when they come in and throughout the store and then of course limiting the number of people and physical distancing markers.”
As far as the overall comfort level, DeSantis says just over half, 53 percent, were feeling at least somewhat comfortable going out to local businesses, 22 percent they weren’t comfortable at all while the rest were taking a wait and see approach.
Another part of the questionnaire showed we’re okay with people from the area visiting but the farther away the visitors are from, the less inviting we seem to be.
74 percent of Kamloopsians welcome people from nearby communities but that drops to 24 percent from out of province and just eight percent from the US and other countries.
DeSantis says provinces in the east may be fine with outsiders coming in but it’s a different story here. “BC, no. We’re pretty conservative. Dr Bonnie Henry has kept us pretty safe throughout this whole pandemic and I think we’re just a little nervous.”
“You know, we’ve spent a lot of time engaging with the city of Kamloops and as tourism, it is a community initiative and it’s a community economic driver and we’re in this together.”
She added the questionnaire’s focus was to help with their own plans moving forward. “We wanted to make sure that we weren’t marketing of misstepping outside of what our community wanted, so were really are going to take these cues from the survey when we look at marketing and be very careful and purposeful on how we move forward with our marketing and who we are going to invite.”
DeSantis stressed how important it is to keep on top of how people are feeling. “Right now we’re going to sit tight with explore local and then as things relax we’re probably do a couple more of these surveys just to gage how the community is feeling as we move forward with out marketing efforts and ensuring that our community is willing and able and wanting to invite visitor back into Kamloops as soon a possible.”
As far as supporting our own community, a whopping 96 percent said it’s very important and DeSantis says she finds that very encouraging.
