Executives at Tourism Windsor Essex County Pelee Island predict it will be at least two years before the tourism industry recoveries from the pandemic.
VP Lynnette Bain said that recovery could happen more quickly if the federal government removes the need for travellers to use the ArriveCan application to answer COVID-19-related questions.
"ArriveCan really does remove that spontaneous travel, that rubber tire, day-trip traffic coming across the border. ArriveCan is definitely a barrier for that," said Bain.
TWEPI is currently working with Destination Ontario to target the nearly 4-million residents within an hour of the Canadian border.
"Rubber-tire traffic is definitely our bread and butter and day trips are a big part of that. U.S. visitation at our peak was almost half of total visitors of 5 million visitors to Windsor-Essex, so it's a really important market for us," said Bain.
This week, border city mayors called on the federal government to remove the ArriveCan app requirement for land border traffic.
