Forty-eight years after the Winter Olympics were first proposed for Whistler, and with just 23 months to go before the Olympics finally come true, Olympic organizers, the community and various official agencies are still working on some important details for the 2010 Games.
Planning for 2010 has come to mean planning for the five-week period of the Olympics and Paralympics in 2010 — with the understanding that if we do it well there will be payoffs in the years to follow. But there’s going to be nine months of 2010 after the Paralympics wrap up, and almost a month and a half of 2010 prior to the Olympics getting underway.
And Whistler won’t be quite the same place following the Olympics and Paralympics. How prepared are we for the absence of big-budget construction projects in the summer of 2010 and the workers who have occupied so much rental housing in recent summers? With a boost in global awareness through the Olympics and some smart marketing, convention business and tourist numbers should pick up substantially in the years following 2010 — Sydney is the model here. But it may take some deft marketing to take the millions of impressions of Whistler generated from the winter Olympics and turn those into new visits by the summer of 2010.
The point is that the impact of the 2010 Olympics and Paralympics is going to extend well beyond the five weeks of the two Games. In the long term that impact should be very beneficial to Whistler, but the first 10 months of 2010 could be very challenging for local businesses.
Business, generally, is expected to be down in the winter of 2009-2010. Previous Winter Olympic hosts, such as Park City, have found that even though ski areas may be open to the public before and after the Games — and in 2010 Blackcomb and part of Whistler Mountain will be open to the public during the Olympics — skier numbers are down for the entire winter.
Does that mean that business will be down for everyone in Whistler in the winter of 2009-2010? No, but it probably depends on what type of business you are talking about.
Whistler businesses have been advised to come up with a plan for 2010, and many have. For some, that plan is to hang in through the early part of the winter, shut down or go into some other business during the Olympic period, then revert back to the regular business for the tail end of the winter.
While every business plan is based on interpretations of data and educated assumptions, a lot of the fundamental information that should go into a business plan is still not available. For example, the hotels in Whistler, and by extension the village, will no doubt be full during the Games. But who are the people that will be staying in these rooms? If they are Olympic family, officials, security, media and volunteers, they may have different eating, drinking and shopping plans than if they are tourists and Olympic fans. The former probably have lots of official functions to attend and some will be given gifts and souvenirs. The latter are the people that most village businesses are currently set up to handle.
Undoubtedly there will be thousands of people coming from all over the world to see the Olympic events in Whistler. But if most of the people who buy tickets to Whistler events are coming from Vancouver by bus will they have the opportunity to watch the medals ceremonies after the events, have a drink and explore the village, before returning to Vancouver?
The questions above suggest that 2010 will be an unusual and probably challenging year for businesses in Whistler. In the long term, it may also be extremely rewarding. And knowing that this unusual year lies ahead helps us prepare for it.
But 2009 will hold its own challenges. At the top of the list is labour. Finding enough people to fill the jobs in Whistler has been a challenge for several years now. Some businesses have had to reduce their hours or the number of days a week they are open. Others have maintained their hours but with reduced staff haven’t been able to provide the level of service they would like. Both scenarios run counter to Whistler’s best interests.
The figures released this week from the 2006 census are not encouraging. The census found that workers are more likely to be over 40 than under 40, and that the jobless rate is at its lowest level in modern Canadian history.
The labour crunch is going to be an issue for years to come. While businesses everywhere are putting more emphasis on human resources, in Whistler one of the obstacles to recruiting employees for 2009 and 2010 will remain accommodation. As Kirby Brown, Whistler-Blackcomb’s former director of human resources said last fall: “Anecdotally, my comment to the community would be this: that no longer are there enough young folks out there on the planet willing to take the risk to come to Whistler to find a job and then hope to get housing.”
With two challenging years ahead, one of the most proactive things Whistler businesses could do is to get behind the H.O.M.E. committee and its proposal for temporary employee housing.
