Photo: Contributed

Tourism Kelowna keeps surviving the smoky summers, but just barely. So it is going to get aggressive and push for four-season marketing from its stakeholders.

“It’s a chicken-and-egg scenario,” Tourism Kelowna president and CEO Lisanne Ballantyne said this week. “Do we wait for all the product to come out, meaning everybody starts offering winter product and services, and then we start promoting it?

“Or do we start promoting ourselves as a year-round destination, and that will create demand for the product. So we’re going to go down the middle somehow, and we’re going to at least start giving our stakeholders an idea of where the gaps might be through an audit we’re doing, where we might need some product or there might be a timing gap on the calendar, and then we’ll start promoting.”

Ballantyne delivered that message to a packed house at Kelowna Yacht Club on Tuesday during Kelowna Tourism Society’s annual general meeting.

Ballantyne reported the number of hotel stays was up over the last 12 months compared to the previous year, even though that figure was down during the summer months due to the wildfire smoke that blanketed the Okanagan Valley.

For more on this story, visit Okanagan Edge.