It was a busy summer for tourism in Houston. 502 parties totalling 743 people visited over the month of July, and that increased to 556 and 955 individuals for the month of August according to Destination B.C.’s visitor service network statistics. It’s a large jump of from June, which had just 201 parties and 265 people. Going back to May, there were only 100 parties totalling 124 people.

Houston Today spoke to Maureen Czirfusz, the Executive Director at the Houston & District Chamber of Commerce and asked if the spike in numbers had something to do with the COVID-19 restrictions being loosened during the summer.

“Partly,” she said. “July was also the start of summer break for schools though, and there were more families travelling.”

READ MORE:Tourism up in Burns Lake for month of July

Czirfusz also mentioned that people travelling to Houston didn’t seem to be nervous about COVID-19 variants. “No, all visitors have been great.”

As expected due to the pandemic, a large portion of the visitors came from within B.C.. 312 of the parties from June and 430 of the parties from August were B.C travellers according to Destination B.C.. Over 60 per cent of the visitors for both months were single day travellers.

The one party to visit from the United States came in August, after Canada announced that fully vaccinated American citizens were permitted to travel Canada on Aug. 9.

Czirfusz also told Houston Today that despite the COVID-19 restrictions being lifted in B.C. for a large portion of the summer, there wasn’t an increase in foreign travellers calling to try to plan trips for 2022 in anticipation of the pandemic ending.

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