Salt Spring’s central hub for visitor information is spinning up for a summer season with tourist numbers that may eclipse years past.
With the first Salt Spring Saturday Market of the year on the books, many island businesses are well and truly open for the summer, and many believe the national hesitance to travel to the U.S. — spurred in part by the trade imbroglio with our southern neighbours’ leadership — could make 2025 one of the busiest on record. According to volunteers at the Salt Spring Visitor Information Centre, the island’s businesses have been calling in with updates on extending operating hours — all of which goes onto the ever-expanding “big board” maintained there.
And it’s looking like a big year for residents’ friends and families to visit and for tourists from far and near, according to centre volunteer Lynne Fraser, who joined in predicting a “bumper crop” of Canadians visiting Salt Spring this year.
“There have already been people from places like Vancouver Island that didn’t want to travel [south], but wanted a change,” said Fraser. “They’d lived on Vancouver Island all their lives and have never been here!”
The centre is stocking up on printed things like schedules and brochures, volunteers said, but have increasingly found visitors opting to instead take a picture on their cell phones and bring that with them — capturing images of maps, the “big board” and other information from local websites they are now able to pull up quickly, thanks to a just-donated laptop computer courtesy Country Grocer.
“The Visitor Centre is such a valuable resource for Salt Spring,” said Country Grocer’s community relations manager Robert Steinbach, who stopped by to drop off the laptop and fresh flowers for the front desk. “It helps every industry on the island, so of course we want to help speed things up for the volunteers here.”
The centre is open from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. weekdays, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays and closed Sundays.