Chinook Country Tourism “forced” to reconsider its purpose and mission

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“We are looking at new steps and how to stay sustainable. We market for the Waterton Park Chamber of Commerce and do all the Waterton Lakes Marketing. We’ve done programs for all of southern Alberta, you know several other projects for other attractions; Blackfoot Crossings Historical Park. So, we’re just looking to see if there’s municipalities or other organizations that would need help with their destination marketing and we’d be available to do that.”

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And he doesn’t rule out working with LDMO’s Executive Director William Slenders as well on future projects, saying there are some partnership opportunities that might be explored.

At the upcoming Chinook Country Tourism annual meeting, Wyslouzil says they’ll ask members to ratify a new strategic direction that will see the association adopt a fee for service agency business model.

As for whether the Visitor Information Centre at the corner of Mayor Magrath and Scenic Drive will remain open after the summer is over, he’s not confident it will.

In fact, even staying open for the entire summer may not be a possibility.

“There’s lots of parking, there’s a Sani-dump here, a picnic shelter and playground, there’s interpretative panels, plus the visitor’s centre which provides information. We’ve committed, we’ll be here for a good part of the summer and see how things unfold.”

The City of Lethbridge owns the land the Visitor’s Centre sits on, and they may not be able to continue to stay much longer, although he adds that no move has been made to repurpose the property just yet.

If or when that occurs, Wyslouzil says there’s plenty of office space in Lethbridge for them to move into. That said, staffing levels have also been reduced from about 10 employees to just three.

“We’ve had our people leave because they needed some certainty, and we were still in an uncertain position.”

A new LDMO visitor centre is scheduled to open in downtown Lethbridge in May that will focus on attracting foot traffic. Five digital kiosks will also be located at strategic locations throughout the city for visitors to get information.

“I certainly understand that the trend in visitor servicing is changing to a degree because of technology,” admits Wyslouzil.”But we still find about 12,000 people a year have been stopping in at this centre. And we were open year-round. There’s still people. They still want directions… and we still have a lot of residents who seek information.”