I have a few apologies to make. I understand a seven-year-old girl purchased a copy of last week’s Inuvik Drum, hoping to see a picture of her Canada Day Parade float. Unfortunately, the pictures I took of said float were either out of focus, overexposed or otherwise unprintable. Consequentially, the girl’s float did not get showcased.
Letting down adults is one thing. They’re supposed to have the tools to move on. But letting down a child is something that’s going to stick with me for a long time. So I apologize for this, and will do my best to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
I also want to extend an apology to anyone employed by the town, particularly in the tourism department, who may have interpreted last week’s editorial as an attack. It was not intended to be an attack in any way, shape or form. I know that the town’s staff, especially its tourism department, put more hours into this community than the rest of us combined. I was merely attempting to point out holes I was seeing in our overall tourism industry over the last month and attempting to put out ideas people may not think of because they’re so busy trying to keep up.
All that being said, there are several other holes that I think need to be pointed out and I ran out of room last week to list them all, so let us continue.
One area the town’s tourism department absolutely excels is advanced notice. I already know when the next Sunrise Festival, the next Muskrat Jamboree and the next Arctic Development Expo is going to be. Not only does this make my job easier, it makes life a lot easier for anyone planning a trip to the Delta. Setting dates a full year in advance may be beyond the capacity of most tourism stakeholders, but really every festival in the Delta should attempt to at least have their dates publicly known a few months in advance.
Carrying this thought further, the Delta’s over-reliance on social media works against its tourism industry. I can’t speak for everyone, but whenever I’m travelling in a new place and I want to know what’s going on, I pick up a newspaper. I certainly don’t have time to sort through dozens of pages using my limited roaming data to hopefully get an idea of what is happening. As an example, there was a festival in Tsiigehtchic this past weekend, but you wouldn’t know it unless you belonged to a specific social media group or drove by. Communities cannot expect tourists to come in and spend money at these festivals if the tourists don’t know they’re happening. Without a central information hub which newspapers like the Inuvik Drum provide, tourism departments are largely shouting into a vacuum.
The town is making a push to clean up derelict properties and remove abandoned vehicles, an excellent step for improving tourist’s word of mouth. But we should also be looking at our unused assets. The Midnight Sun Complex has a fully equipped kitchen that has sat empty ever since someone claimed they found a hair in a bun and made a big deal of it on social media. Getting an entrepreneur interested in fixing up and running the facility is clearly not working. If no private investor is interested, maybe the town could operate the facility itself, providing employment and creating a potential revenue stream.
Surely there are legit reasons for some of these holes. But they’re still there and will continue to work against us until they’re filled.