TIABC Voice of Tourism Newsletter – June 12, 2026

I remember one night on a summer camping trip staring up at a perfectly clear sky with my daughter, who was about ten years old at the time. We were lying on our backs, hands behind our heads, counting the brightest stars we could find.

“How many stars are there, Mommy?” she asked.

Without Google at hand and not wanting to dampen the moment with a technical explanation I did not have, I gave the most confident parental guess I could muster.

“Billions,” I said.

Later, when I did have access to Google, I discovered I was only off by a few trillion. There are, in fact, roughly 200 billion trillion stars in the observable universe.

“How many is a billion?” she asked next.

Faced with that question, I defaulted to the most academic answer imaginable.

“A lot.”

She seemed satisfied. I was still the smartest person in the ‘room’.

Even now, I find it challenging to help people truly grasp what a billion looks like. For most of us, even a few thousand of anything can feel abstract. Being in a stadium packed with 50,000 people feels immense when you are surrounded by them. Standing on a beach, knowing you could never count every grain of sand, gives you a sense of scale. Looking up at a sky scattered with stars does the same. These are moments that make vast numbers feel real, even if we cannot fully comprehend them. These things, however, are tangible. You can see them and, in some cases, you can touch them.

Money is somehow different. Most of us understand thousands of dollars. Some of us can wrap our heads around hundreds of thousands. Millions start to stretch the imagination. Billions? Most of us will never see a billion dollars. That is when the numbers begin to float away from reality.

These days, I find myself talking a lot about billions of dollars. Not in reference to my bank account, unfortunately, but in reference to the economic impact of tourism in BC.

Tourism generates approximately $23 billion in economic activity in our province each year. It contributes nearly $8 billion to BC’s GDP and generates roughly $2.1 billion annually in provincial and municipal tax revenues. These are really big and often,intangible numbers.

Yet I often wonder how they land with people. I see the polite nods and hear the acknowledgments, but I am not always convinced the magnitude truly connects.

So …I have been thinking about how to make those numbers more meaningful. I thought that this newsletter is the perfect place to try.

Before I begin there are a couple of caveats: the numbers I quote are averages and the amounts are not necessarily directed towards the examples used below. Rather, the examples are to help us better understand the economic impact of tourism in BC. Also, for the purpose of this exercise, let’s focus on just one of the numbers: the $2.1 billion in annual tax revenue generated by tourism in BC. To allow me some creative license, I will combine provincial and municipal revenues to translate that figure into something more concrete.

Let’s start by making that number more tangible, let’s ground it in something we all understand: education. Based on the average baseline funding rate allocated by the province to school districts in 2026/27, which is approximately $9,015 per student, $2.1 billion would just about cover the general per-student funding for every public-school student in Metro Vancouver. That represents the baseline payment for roughly 233,000 BC children – every year.

Another way to make this more concrete is through health care, something every one of us relies on. Using an average construction cost of approximately $1.25 million per hospital bed, that same $2.1 billion would equate to the capital cost of building facilities for roughly 1680 hospital beds – annually.

Finally, if we look at long-term care, using an average cost of $1.88 million per bed, that annual tourism tax revenue could support the construction of facilities supporting approximately 1117 long-term care beds for seniors.

When you begin to translate billions of dollars into schools, hospital beds, and long-term care facilities, the scale becomes more real. It moves from abstract to impactful and shifts from “a lot” to something that touches communities directly.

Tourism is often associated with experiences, attractions, and hospitality. Those are the visible elements. Behind those experiences is a significant economic engine that supports public services and community infrastructure across the province.

When we talk about ‘tourism as BC’s economic superpower’, we are not using a slogan. We are describing a sector that materially contributes to the services and systems people rely on every day.

My daughter accepted “a lot” as an answer about the stars. However, as adults, as leaders, and as citizens, we owe ourselves a clearer understanding of what a billion really means.

In BC, it means more schools, more hospital beds and more long-term care facilities. It means community services.

It means tourism matters.

Amber Papou, B.Ed, MBA, ICD.D

CEO, TIABC