Visitor numbers to St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre have climbed back up to pre-pandemic levels and there’s a potential to grow them even more, curator Kathleen Powell says. Powell said before the COVID-19 pandemic struck Niagara in March 2020, the museum was welcoming about 105,000 visitors annually.
That dropped to 30,000 visitors for all of 2020 and just less than 44,000 in 2021. By 2023, the numbers had climbed to 104,833, and Powell said the museum is on pace this year. “Current visitation so far this year is more than 99,000 visitors, so if we continue in that vein, we’ll actually exceed probably the 105,000, which has kind of been the average we’ve had over the last several non-COVID years.
” Powell was presenting a new seven-year strategic plan for St. Catharines Museum and Welland Canals Centre to city council this month, which included enhancing engagement with the community and improving the visitor experience. She said based on current trends since the pandemic, the museum has been very busy and “a reasonable conservative expectation” would be it could grow annual visitor numbers to 110,000 or 120,000 by the end of the plan’s timeframe in 2030.
“Sometimes it’s a little bit dependent on how much resources we have to be able to really promote the site outside of our current market and we are kind of limited by that,” she said. “But at the same time, it’s a very, very popular tourist destination and as long as it continues to d.
