HOTELS OR BUST:
VANCOUVER’S MAKEOR-BREAK MOMENT FOR FUTURE EVENTS AND TOURISM BY JIM BYERS
Speed up permits. Provide federal loan guarantees for hotel developers. And find a way to make sure people understand what a new hotel can do for a city or neighbourhood.
Building new hotel rooms “is crucial for our global destination competitiveness,” Destination Vancouver president and CEO Royce Chwin offered after the 2023 study was released.
Taylor Swift is coming to Vancouver this year. The World Cup of Soccer is rolling into town in 2026. But the city has actually lost hotel rooms.
“Lack of available hotel rooms will make visiting Vancouver even more expensive, and the city will be less competitive in attracting major conferences, large sporting events and leisure group travel. Vancouver is running short on time to prepare for the influx of visitors and the economic impact they contribute to the city. Those visitors will just go elsewhere,” he says.
With major events on the way, and bids for new ones surely to come, a 2023 Vancouver hotel study released by Destination Vancouver says 20,000 new hotel rooms are needed in Metro Vancouver by 2050. Ten thousand of those rooms are needed just in the city of Vancouver, which isn’t exactly brimming with empty development parcels. It’s doable in theory, but it’s worth noting that Vancouver has actually been losing hotel rooms, not building new ones. “Our historic peak of hotel rooms was in 2002,” says Gwendal Castellan, manager, sustainable destination development, at Destination Vancouver. “We’ve had a steady loss of rooms since then.” A Destination Vancouver study last year said the city has lost 1,500 rooms since 2010. The pandemic removed an additional 550 rooms from Vancouver’s hotel inventory. 20
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City government executives, tourism board representatives and business people serve on what’s called the Hotel Development Task Force, which is looking at ways that Vancouver can satisfy demand for major events already booked, and continue to lure big conferences, concerts and sporting events to the city and region in the next quarter-century. A new set of recommendations is expected sometime in October. “The task force is developing priority issues that can expedite the planning, approval and building of new properties, which include but are not limited to zoning and rezoning, height considerations, taxation on highest and best use, air space not to be included during planning and building,