Huron County Economic Development Officer Says More Visitors From The GTA Are Discovering Huron County

by Bob Montgomery

Huron County Economic Development Officer Rick Sickinger, who is also responsible for tourism, says the number of tourists coming to Huron County is increasing and more of them are coming from the GTA.

Sickinger says one of the challenges they've had to deal with is that up until 2017 the province provided them with data that told them how many visitors were coming to Huron County each year and where they were coming from but that stopped in 2017. “So we went through pre-COVID, we went all the way through the COVID years and post-COVID without really having solid data about who was visiting and how many visitors were coming to Huron County.”

Sickinger says their tourism operators were telling them that tourism was increasing this year, their sale receipts were going up but they didn't have anything to confirm that. But then Regional Tourism Organization 4, which they belong to, supported contracting IPSOS in 2022 to do an economic impact assessment of tourism in Huron County. They reached out to people who visited Huron County in 2022 and submitted a report in 2023. The report showed that they had 1.2 million visitors in 2022 with total spending of $160 million. The report also noted a change in where some of the visitors were coming from. It showed that the largest number of visitors coming to Huron County are still coming from Southwestern Ontario, so Kitchener-Waterloo, London, Owen Sound and surrounding area make up 45% of visitors, but the biggest change was visitors from the GTA. The IPSOS report showed that in 2022, 41% of the visitors to Huron County were coming from the GTA. Sickinger says back in 2017 when they were getting data from the province, that number was lower than 10%.

“So a huge increase since COVID. We attribute that to during the lock down quite a few people from the city were travelling to rural areas, so we think we were discovered through those years and those people are continuing to come to Huron County now that they've discovered it.” Sickinger also believes that tourists from the GTA, if they were looking for lake shore vacations traditionally either went east or north to Muskoka and those areas have become a little crowded so people have discovered Huron County.