The County’s new Destination Marketing Organization, Visit the County, held its first Annual General Meeting at Wild Lot Distillery in November. It presented its 2022 financial statements, a review of its first year of operations, visitor statistics, and a look ahead to 2024.

VTC is sustained through a 50% share of the proceeds of the Municipal Accommodation Tax, a 4% charge applied to overnight stays.

In 2022, VTC’s share of the revenue, collected by individual STA hosts and remitted to the County every quarter, was $462,000.

The money goes in part to salaries, advertising and branding, and digital-media content creation. VTC is planning the launch of a new website early next year, and a revitalization of the Taste Trail is in the works.

Visit the County’s mandate includes four key goals: to grow tourism revenue for operators in the County; to develop the County as a premier tourist destination, and to serve the visitors that come here. VTC accomplishes this latter goal through its County Ambassador program, ten information kiosks, and trip-planning services, including partnerships with STA organizations. The fourth goal is “to enrich the lives of residents through community-building.”

A highly prized portion of the work VTC does is collect data and track tourist visits. There were 1.13 million tourist visits to PEC in 2022. At just 4% below 2019 numbers, it’s a number that has held steady.

Across the tourism sector, 2019 is recognized as a crucial benchmark year, as it precedes the wild fluctuations the sector experienced across the pandemic.

The real news is a stunning drop in the number of unique visits, or actual visitors, to PEC. In 2019, there were 225,000 unique visitors. In 2022, that number was just 112,000.

By way of comparison, the pandemic years created 240,000 unique visitors in 2020 and in 2021, 350,000.

Yet these numbers do not tell the whole story. If actual visitors have dropped, repeat visits, those by the same tourist, have doubled since 2019. On average, each visitor to PEC in 2022 “came back” 10 times. In 2019, the return rate was half that.

That is a significant shift in tourist behaviour. Fewer visitors, but those that come enjoy longer stays, and spend more money. A lot more. The shifts point to a County that is cultivating a well-heeled, and loyal clientele.

“Our focus is the high-value guests, the high-value consumers, and they are interested in regenerative tourism, sustainability, eco-friendly initiatives, and of course our beautiful rural landscapes,” said Rebecca Lamb, who chairs the VTC board.

VTC has redesigned the Visit the County brand, through logo, visual identity, voice, and tone, to target the upscale consumer it tries to attract.

It now works with two full-time staff members. Ali Kaufman is Visit the County’s in-house social media content creator. “We are very conscious of the story we bring, that we are the curators of the PEC story. We also want to set an accurate expectation for the visitors who come here,” said VTC’s Executive Director, Eleanor Cook.

In June, the organization hired a Marketing and Special Projects Coordinator, Lindsay Medeiros, who brings expertise from RTO 9, the regional tourism organization.

The team reaches the tourist sector primarily through social media. Visit the County boasts 37,000 followers on Instagram. 705 local businesses are listed on its website, where an average of about 30k viewers a month search events and explore travel itineraries, though numbers vary with the seasons. A key demographic includes those 35-44.

VTC also works hard to keep the County visible in the surrounding media landscape. Since its inception, 86 articles, in publications ranging from MacLeans to House and Home, The Globe and Mail and La Presse, have been published, touting the wonders of the County as an upscale holiday destination.

Our busiest months are July, August, and October. VTC reports 95,000 room nights booked in 2022, half of those between July and September. AirDNA, which collates bookings across all major platforms, reports 113,409 nights booked in 2023 and 127,650 in 2022. In 2019, 122,967 nights were booked.

AirDNA records an 11% drop in overall visitor nights in 2023 over the previous year.

Visit the County’s first deputation to council comes in February, when it will present financial statements for its first full year, 2023.