Tourism Congress – A Glimpse at What TIAC Does

Welcome back to the Tourism Congress! Our annual gathering of tourism professionals from across Canada will, as always, cover themes and topics of national interest, and relate to TIAC’s ongoing federal advocacy efforts.

In the weeks leading up to Congress, we will be using this section of the Congress Newsletter to tie in this year’s Tourism Congress content with what TIAC does.

The official opening of Congress serves as our stepping stone into the rest of the conference. It’s also TIAC’s first major event post-election, which means we’ll be exploring new themes, opportunities, and challenges as we all join shortly after the 2019 federal election.

In 2018, tourism spending added $102B to the Canadian economy and that continued to support 1.8 million jobs. We are also one of the few sectors in Canada that are present to some degree in every area of the country. Tourism has grown consistently in Canada the last number of years, and 2018 set yet another record with 21.1 million international arrivals.

While our numbers are good, and growth is strong, Canada still has room for improvement. Globally, tourism is the world’s fastest-growing sector. The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) estimates that 1.4 billion people travelled the world in 2018 – a record they did not expect to see until 2020. Of this total, we only see about 2% of global travellers visiting Canada every year.

This top-level view, on the backdrop of the 2019 federal election, is the context that we kick off Congress. We will see what the industry does well, what we can do better, and how we can work with the government to ensure the tourism sector is a force of the future.