I’m sure glad to see that you use room nights sold as the best way to measure tourism. Problem is with so many unlicensed properties in HRM and NS now (maybe 2500 ) , no one really knows what is the real number of room nights sold night sold, and even worse 99% of that 2500 do not have to pay commercial property taxes , or collect HST or collect room taxes. Counting
“visitors” and pretending to know what they spend is basically all fiction . They are not fact based measures . A car from PEI coming to Dartmouth Costco for the day is not really a tourist . Counts in Jan , Feb and March ,and November and December throw the annual total out of whack . Our season is really May toOctober but that is never what is used as a year to year comparison . Cruise line day-trippers also distorts the real picture .
I’m sure glad to see that you use room nights sold as the best way to measure tourism. Problem is with so many unlicensed properties in HRM and NS now (maybe 2500 ) , no one really knows what is the real number of room nights sold night sold, and even worse 99% of that 2500 do not have to pay commercial property taxes , or collect HST or collect room taxes. Counting
“visitors” and pretending to know what they spend is basically all fiction . They are not fact based measures . A car from PEI coming to Dartmouth Costco for the day is not really a tourist . Counts in Jan , Feb and March ,and November and December throw the annual total out of whack . Our season is really May toOctober but that is never what is used as a year to year comparison . Cruise line day-trippers also distorts the real picture .
Peter S | May 11, 2018 |