Travel writers heaping praise on our fair city

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/10/2017 (3130 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As winter starts to breathe down our scarf-bundled necks, this story about Winnipeg becoming a newly discovered jewel of a destination for jaded travel writers may feel, well, a bit out of season.

But I’ve got news for you.

This week, Expedia.ca included Winnipeg on a blogger’s list of the 10 Canadian cities with the coolest downtowns — even with the iconic Portage and Main intersection remaining barricaded to pedestrians.

“It’s no mistake Winnipeg is home to multiple Olympic speed skaters,” the report reads. “In winter, its frozen rivers make up the longest natural skating path in the world. It’s also got the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, the first national museum to be built outside the National Capital Region. A city centre with that kind of record certainly deserves to be called one of the best downtowns in Canada.”

Yes, Toronto and Vancouver made the list — and so did Brandon and Moose Jaw, Sask.

Still this most recent recognition — along with others such as the USA Today readers poll from June that placed the museum as the No. 2 top travel destination in Canada behind only Quebec City — is yet another indication our notoriously cold city has become a travel hot spot.

That’s especially true for travel writers who help describe and drive our brand.

And that — much to my surprise — is what I chanced to learn simply by bumping into a former Free Press colleague at our neighbourhood grocery store. Maureen Fitzhenry is now media relations manager for the museum. When I inquired how things were going there, she said it’s been busy. In September the three-year-old building that’s become our skyline’s beacon to the world welcomed its one-millionth visitor.

That wasn’t what surprised me, though; what surprised me was why it’s been so busy for Fitzhenry. Last year, she told me, the museum welcomed 120 travel writers from across Canada, the United States and around the world.

All of them were sponsored, in whole or in part, by Travel Manitoba. There were even more travel writers in the city, but Tourism Winnipeg doesn’t have a way of breaking out statistics on the visits it co-sponsored with the province from those paid for by the museum itself. 

Anyway, that figure — 120 — represents the largest number of travel writers the province’s tourism drum-beaters has invited in the past five years to sample the delights of not only Winnipeg, but also exotic locales elsewhere, such as Churchill, Riding Mountain National Park and Gimli.  

Why so many last year? 

Part of that is because funding for Travel Manitoba had increased substantially, but Linda Whitfield, Travel Manitoba’s vice-president of marketing and communications, thinks it’s also because of the recent buzz about our province and particularly about our land-locked island of a city.

“I would say the bigger factor is the awareness and the higher profile we’ve been receiving,” Whitfield said this week.

Fitzhenry described what that profile looks like in an email follow-up to our chance encounter.

“Winnipeg is considered a fascinating and surprising destination off the beaten path,” Fitzhenry wrote. “You might remember that National Geographic Traveller in November 2015 named Winnipeg among their Top 20 places in the world to visit in 2016, and the Vogue story from October 2016 (which calls Winnipeg a ‘must-visit’ destination).”

Actually, I missed that, but apparently the international travel community didn’t. For example, Petra Shepherd, a British writer for the seniors-oriented SilverTravelAdvisor.com, was here in August. And Fitzhenry said Toronto Star travel editor Jennifer Bain has visited more than once this year and recently ran a freelancer’s story about the Hermetic Code tour of the Manitoba legislature. 

“In her Facebook post,” Fitzhenry said of Bains, “she called Winnipeg ‘one of my favourite cities.’”

Dayna Spiring, is the CEO of Economic Development Winnipeg — which includes Tourism Winnipeg — and she has a broader view of why we’ve become so appealing.

“I think if you look over the last decade,” she said, “and you see how this city has invested in the city and in attractions, you know, it’s starting to pay off for us. Whether you look at the airport, or Investors Group Field, the museum for human rights, the Manitoba Museum, Assiniboine Park.”

She didn’t mention the Jets, but I will.

All of that, Spiring explained, offers the city a repertoire of attractions for visitors — and, of course, for the rest of us.

Fitzhenry believes this positive change has made Winnipeggers prouder of the place we live and maybe, like the travel writers she welcomes, happy to also tell the world what we have to offer.

Last week, Fitzhenry welcomed two more travel writers — Diane Bair, who contributes to the Boston Globe travel section and Amy Nelson, who freelances her stories to the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Nelson, who paid her own way, was impressed.

So was her 17-year-old daughter, Isabel Sander, who tagged along with a girlfriend to check out the University of Manitoba. Nelson had never visited Winnipeg and all she had heard about the city from friends in the Twin Cities is how cold it is up here. 

That’s not the impression she left with on an unseasonably warm October weekend, after visiting the Exchange District more than once. Fitzhenry said one phrase she hears all the time from visiting writers has nothing to so with how the tired tale of how cold Winnipeg is.

“They say, ‘I just never thought Winnipeg would be so cool.’”

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca