How tourism changed in Canada during the pandemic
Canada's hard-hit tourism industry is adapting to the new times.
Some experts say Canada's tourism industry lost about a third of its workforce in the first 10 weeks after the global pandemic was announced.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a huge impact on all areas of the Canadian economy, but the tourism sector has fared worse than many others.
"The reality is that tourism has been hit very hard. And we know it will take much longer to recover than the rest of the country's economy as a whole," says Philip Mondor, CEO of Tourism HR Canada. — After the global pandemic was announced, we lost about a third of our workforce (880,000) workers within 10 weeks. And we're still about 500,000 workers short.
But, according to Mondor, employers in the tourism industry did not leave the laid-off and downsized workers to their fate. They tried to reach out to them and provide assistance. More attention was paid to supporting the mental health of the affected workers, and psychologists worked with many people.
Role reversal
As early as last summer, it was clear that the Canadian travel industry would have to rethink all of its strategies and workforce management plans in order to cope with the economic changes.
Employees of travel agencies who managed to stay in their workplaces faced a lot of innovations. As Mondor explained, previously they all interacted with travel consumers in person, face to face. But with the pandemic, their job duties have changed the most. Now they can't just do their usual job, they're rethinking business models and looking for other possible scenarios to interact with customers.
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