It’s easy to scoff at the idea of Guelph as a tourist destination. What are people coming to Guelph for, the little train at Riverside Park? Planet Bean? (No disrespect to either of those fine Guelph institutions.)
It might be easy to side with the curmudgeons on this idea that Guelph council is wasting its time, and yours, on developing the Royal City’s tourist possibilities. Even the numbers don’t seem to work in our favour with research done by the city and the Chamber of Commerce pointing to 70 per cent of visits to Guelph being made by the friends and family of people already here, and half of them are from the GTA.
In other words, ain’t nobody getting on a plane in Omaha, or Sheboygan, and coming to Guelph to stay at the Delta and checking out the Beer.Bus or McCrae House because they put a finger on a globe at random.
But tourism is more than one kind of thing. Yes, Guelph doesn’t have a lot of internationally renowned landmarks, or tourist trap industries like theme parks, but don’t think people just come here because they haven’t seen Uncle Ken and Aunt Bev for a while. I was confronted with my own cynicism on this when I took a job years ago working at a local hotel.
Admittedly, it was kind of a surprise the first couple of times I was working the front desk, booking rooms, and seeing weekends fill up. Why? Tournaments. Every tournament of the rainbow comes to the Royal City including dancers, swimmers, skaters, baseball players, and ringette-ers (?). There were also occasionally hockey teams, which I mention separately because, and I mean this sincerely, hockey parents are the worst type of humans. (Don’t “at” me, I have a pretty strong consensus on this point.)
Along with the tournaments, there were guests attending business events and conferences, there were out of town work crews doing forest management or construction, and on some occasions, there were visitors attending local events in nearby communities. The Home Hardware convention in St. Jacobs and the Fergus Scottish Festival were among them; massive events in communities nearby with a small number of hotels in those towns.
Now this very unscientific and anecdotal research of mine was pre-pandemic, so it may be even more irrelevant standing here in the year 2024, but the experience is still important because I might be full curmudgeon on this idea that there’s nothing worth seeing, or talking about, tourism-wise in Guelph so why has city hall made this sinkhole of a Municipal Accommodation Tax.
But that’s also the crux of the problem, this is one of those things where you have to see it to believe it, and if you’re a Guelphite going about your life and you don’t work in the hospitality industry and don’t’ have kids involved in sports, how aware are you of all the non-Guelphites walking around or why they’re here?
This lack of awareness is, in part, due to the loss of the local monoculture. Once upon a time, we had dedicated sports and cultural coverage through a few dedicated media outlets. We had an alt-weekly that was expressly dedicated to the smaller cultural and counter-cultural events. If you had an event to promote, you had to go through one of those gates, and you were guaranteed to get your event caught in the wide net those outlets casted.
Echo chambers don’t just have a negative impact on news consumption, but cultural consumption too. You may listen to all your music on Spotify now, which theoretically puts a world of songs at your fingertips, but the algorithm only ends up feeding you more of what you already know you like. Even the “discover” tab offers precious little in actual discovery, or to put it another way, “surprise.”
I fear that this is where we find the limits in creating a tourism strategy, especially around cultural events because culture is an organic creation, you build it by creating a confluence of thing. It’s why lesser know bands warm up the crowd before the headliner comes out, it’s why comic cons have artists alleys with new talent, it’s why film festivals have programs for shorts and new filmmakers.
It’s also worth noting that true cultural cache withers in places where there’s gentrification, and this is where we have to talk about Guelph’s affordability issues because the type of young people that start a band, or create a cultural festival were priced out of Guelph a while ago. Small kooky festivals like Kazoofest were done even before the pandemic, and cool, hole-in-the-wall venues like Trasheteria and Shadow have since been transformed into boutique eateries with faux kitsch.
On the flip side, upscale venues like the Sleeman Centre, the River Run Centre, and the Guelph Music Youth Centre have this very inaccessible vibe. In fact, I think I’ve probably been to more political and community meetings at GYMC than anything either youthful or musical.
As for the others, those buildings are largely unused between May and September, and if it’s a matter of city policy to transform underperforming assets, I can’t think of two bigger ones than those two monsters on Woolwich Street.
Sports is kind of an easier sell. Not necessarily to me because I’m still trying to overcome being chubby and asthmatic in high school, but whether we’re talking about curling or pickleball or any number of youth sports tournaments that take place every weekend, it’s clear that Guelph is a sports town and a lot of us don’t know it.
Or, perhaps, want to accept it?
The accusations from the organizers of The GOOD Games, an event meant to appeal to people not necessarily courted by typical amateur sporting events, that city staff were less than receptive to their outreach is concerning. Again, you cannot manufacture culture, and in so much as a lot of influential people want to make Guelph a Bike City, or a Music City, you can’t create something out of nothing.
Good planning is good, but only the people coming to Guelph get to decide why they’re here. Are we really listening is the question.
