Sun Peaks Resort is welcoming the easing of COVID-19 restrictions just ahead of the Family Day Long Weekend.

Chief Marketing Officer, Aidan Kelly, says this upcoming weekend has been the busiest of the ski season in past years, because it is also the President’s Day long weekend in the United States.

“Just in the last couple of days, there have been a lot of Washington state licence plates rolling into the resort, so it is good to see the return of that businesses as well,” he said. “We’ve been seeing a strong uptick in business over recent weeks. It has run a lot smoother this winter because it is not our first rodeo of winter operations.”

“I think we’ll be set up for a really good weekend.”

Overall, Kelly says it has been a tough winter at Sun Peaks Resort driven by COVID-19 restrictions and highway washouts on the Coquihalla and in the Fraser Canyon.

“We feel like we are turning the corner a little bit now and we’re definitely cautiously optimistic though because we have felt that we’ve been turning the corner a couple of times and it was a little bit of a false start,” he added.

“You don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know that another variant is coming. You don’t know that all the highways are going to get washed out with landslides and all of those challenging items that we’ve had to face.”

He says this ski season got off to as bad a start as last year, if not worse, though the resort is in a much different place right now.

“The variant came back last year and then you had all of the highway closures which were really really impactful for our business in a negative way,” Kelly said.

“The difference is that now we are kind of at the midway point of the season while last year all of those restrictions ran right through to the end of the winter but things are loosening up now, and people are feeling a lot more comfortable.”

With the easing of COVID and travel restrictions, Kelly is optimistic that this current ski season will end on a good note.

“How it ends out in the wash at the end of the season, we’ll have to wait and see,” he said.

“From now forward for the second half of the winter, it is looking at lot more positive that last year was, so we are expecting a bit of a bounce back that will hopefully, by the end of the winter, we should be ahead of where we finished last winter but again, we just want to be a little bit cautious and hope it all works in our favour.”

The 2021-22 ski season at Sun Peaks Resort is set to end on April 10.