Visitors down by 50 per cent in Barrington

BY CARLA ALLEN

The Coast Guard

NovaNewsNow.com

The Barrington Visitor Information Centre is reporting a decrease of 47 per cent from last year’s season to date.

In 2006, 3270 visitors were recorded. This year, figures from May, June and July tally 1721.

Warden Louise Halliday says it’s hard to pinpoint the new Barrington bypass as the reason for the decrease.

“I don’t know if you could necessarily blame it on that because if you go to all the other visitor information centres, everybody seems to be down,” she said.

A positive point about the statistics is that at least 75 per cent of the visitors were interested specifically in the area.

“In the past, some visitors that stop there have just stopped to use the washroom or the Internet,” said Halliday.

At earlier council meetings this year, there was some discussion on relocating the Visitor Information Centre closer to Hwy. 103.

“There haven’t been any discussions on it as of late. What we wanted to see was the statistics on how many visited this year. We will examine it at the end of the tourist season and then think about what we are going to do,” said Halliday.