Water bombers fly over the Eagle Bluff wildfire in Osoyoos, B.C., on July 30, after the fire crossed the Canada-U.S. border from Washington State and prompted evacuation orders.JESSE WINTER/Reuters
Only three-quarters of Spirit Ridge’s 228 rooms are occupied, which is a steep drop from the near-full occupancy the resort on Osoyoos Lake usually enjoys during a summer high season that typically lasts well into fall.
The hotel would be much emptier if it weren’t for 20 or so rooms being filled by locals forced to evacuate their homes and another 30 bookings from firefighters who streamed in to battle a wildfire that spread into the popular tourist hot spot of Osoyoos on Saturday from Washington State.
Jana Yackel, a spokesperson for Spirit Ridge, a franchise of the Hyatt chain that sits next to a winery, said management and staff spent Saturday evening cleaning the rooms of guests who cut their holidays short to accommodate the temporary influx of evacuees and first responders.
Since the Eagle Bluff fire blew into British Columbia’s South Okanagan, triggering evacuation orders for 732 properties and alerts for 2,094 others, new guests have continued to arrive but up to 10 people a day have been calling to cancel their stays planned for the hotel, she said. It was unnerving to watch the ridge across the lake go up in flames, she said, but the hotel has not been affected by any evacuation alerts. The BC Wildfire Service also said Monday that favourable winds appear to be helping the agency in its fight to push the out-of-control blaze away from the western flank of the small town.
“There has not been a flood of cancellations, I think people have been waiting to see what was going to happen,” Ms. Yackel said Monday, when a hint of smoke lay in the air.
Uncertainty over summer vacation plans has spread to several regions across Canada’s westernmost province, as the worst wildfire season on record threatens to upend tourism operators halfway through the summer season.
People watch as a water bomber flies over the Eagle Bluff wildfire in Osoyoos, B.C., on July 30. The fire is one of more than 350 active blazes in the province, according to the BC Wildfire Service.JESSE WINTER/Reuters
Jeff Guignard, executive director of B.C.’s Alliance of Beverage Licensees, which represents bars, nightclubs and private liquor and cannabis stores, said it is too early for any concrete data on how wildfires are affecting tourism in the province. But some of his lobby group’s members in the Okanagan and the Kootenays, to the east, report that international tourists began cancelling or rebooking their plans into next year once Canadian fires made headlines around the world earlier this summer.
Plus, he said, the fires are closing highways and slowing the supply of food and drinks, further hammering a tourism sector still trying to recover from pandemic losses while battling steadily rising inflation.
“It’s causing a lot of damage to our industry and our economy,” he said in a phone interview Monday.
Walt Judas, chief executive of the Tourism Industry Association of BC, said Monday that cancellations from wildfires are hitting different regions on a week-by-week basis.
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Earlier this summer on the west coast of Vancouver Island, tourism operators in Tofino and Ucluelet saw business drop 40 per cent because of a nearby wildfire and highway closing, Mr. Judas said. Now, the highway into those towns is still facing rolling closings to shore up slope instability, which is leading to further cancellations in August, he said.
“So that’s the residual effect of one of the wildfires,” said Mr. Judas, whose organization is an “association of associations” in the tourism and hospitality sectors as well as the 50 regional tourism agencies across B.C.
Still, he said, increased spending by B.C. tourists and their compatriots is expected to keep tourism revenue “pretty close to matching” the $22.3-billion spent across the province in 2019, before the pandemic. In 2021, the last year for which official data are available, total overall tourism revenue in B.C. was $13.5-billion, he said.
The Eagle Bluff fire near Osoyoos is one of more than 350 active blazes in the province, according to the BC Wildfire Service, with just under 200 classified as out of control and 14 ranked as fires of note that are either highly visible or pose potential threats to public safety. The fight to save Osoyoos began in spite of the wildfire danger rating having fallen sharply in recent weeks because of rain and cooler weather in most areas of B.C., except the southern and southeast corners.
That easing prompted officials in the Prince George Fire Centre, representing the northeastern quarter of the province, to announce plans to lift a campfire ban in that region, but the decision was reversed just a short time later.
With reports from The Canadian Press