From Niagara This Week:
Tourism officials in Niagara are calling 2006 a tough year as the sun sets on the industry’s busiest season.
With numerous attractions including world-class golf courses, the Journey Behind the Falls, restaurants and gift shops along more than 1,700 hectares (topping 4,000 acres) of parkland along the Niagara River from Fort Erie to Niagara-on-the-Lake drawing millions of people each year, the Niagara Parks Commission is one of the major tourism attractors in the region. But with a forecasted 12 per cent drop in traffic in 2006, which equates to a five per cent drop in revenue, even Niagara Parks is feeling the sting from a mediocre year, said Executive Director Joel Noden.
Our family used to make 4 to 6 trips to the Falls, vacationing, shopping, shopping and more shopping….back to school, Christmas, etc.
The rate exchange was wonderful and we fully took advantage!!! Now it is pennies on the dollar and, with the 15% tax on just about everything, we cannot do it any longer…….PLUS our banks here in the States are charging a 3% transaction fee for every foreign transaction made on our credit cards!!!! Don’t know if that fact is known…so now we are up to 18%!!!
Our kids are adults now and my husband and I still go to the Falls, but it is only a couple times a year. We enjoy the splendor of the Falls and now, with these carefully planned trips, we do no shopping or gambling.
If this year is bad, what will next be like?
I wasn’t sure where to put this, but here it goes. I subscribed to PCMA and in this month’s issue there was a full page article on Niagara Falls (Convention facilities for the Fallsview Casino, Hilton, and Renaissance). Here is the link if you would like to read it:
http://archive.pcma.org/conv/Aug06/Niagara%20128.pdf
or if you don’t have Adobe:
http://www.pcma.org/resources/convene/archives/displayArticle.asp?ARTICLE_ID=5423
Enjoy,
Dan