Has the bottom fallen out for the Visitor Information Centre at the west entrance to the city? Or is there more room for the figures to fall?
Numbers released by Tourism Estevan last week showed the centre had 1,097 visitors this year, which is a little more than half of the 2,097 visitors who entered the building in 2016.
The No. 1 reason people accessed the centre was not for directions or information on events. Rather, it was to use the washrooms.
Now, there could be any one of a number of reasons for the decrease. Last year the Saskatchewan Summer Games were held in Estevan. Thousands of people converged on the city for that incredible week. We didn’t have an event that generated such a large influx of people for several days.
But the numbers at the information centre were down each month, so other factors were seemingly at work.
And while the numbers for 2016 look pretty good compared to this year, the number of visitors for 2016 dropped by about 100 from 2015.
Visitor Information Centres are becoming obsolete. Many of them have shut down already.
We don’t think it’s quite time for Tourism Estevan to make that move yet, but this is a trend that has to be watched closely.
Rather than stopping in at the information centre and asking for directions, people can go to Google Maps and check out how to reach their destination.
A GPS device can tell you how many kilometres it will be before it’s time to make the next turn.
And rather than chatting with knowledgeable people at the tourism booth about what is happening in the community, they can go online and learn more about the Estevan Motor Speedway, the Souris Valley Theatre, the Woodlawn Regional Park or our local hotels and restaurants.
People can print out this information at home before they leave, or they can access it from a smart phone or on a tablet during their travels.
When the log cabin structure was purchased to be our Tourism Information Centre years ago, the centres still had relevance. Smart phones were a relatively new concept. Tablets were non-existent.
That’s not to say they don’t have a place. Some people still use them, particularly those who aren’t technologically savvy, or those who still prefer the old-fashioned paper maps compared with the GPS or the electronic version of a map found on a phone.
So there are people who would be genuinely upset to lose this service.
And some people would still rather get information from an actual person than a machine.
It’s too soon to pull the plug on the information centre. Perhaps the numbers will rebound next year. They might not make it to 2,000 visitors, but there might be enough people to justify keeping the building open.
But if those numbers don’t rebound, if they continue to languish around the 1,000 visitor mark, or if they decline again, then it might be time to pull the plug on the centre.
After all, there are better uses for our taxpayer dollars than a site at the west entrance to the city that struggles to bring in 1,000 people a year for the 3 1/2 months it is open.
