The main attractions in this year’s Lights On Stratford festival were visited over 83,000 times during the annual event’s six-week run, officials say.
The main attractions in this year’s Lights On Stratford festival were visited more than 83,000 times during the annual event’s six-week run, officials say.
Destination Stratford executive director Zac Gribble shared preliminary figures with the Beacon Herald on Thursday, four days after Stratford’s third winter lights festival was officially wrapped.
The numbers are “conservative,” Gribble said.
Festival staff were only able to track visits at five locations – The Pool at Market Square, Affinity at Tom Patterson Island, LightWall at 70 Ontario St., Destination Stratford’s headquarters at 47 Downie St., and the shuttle buses Stratford Transit runs between the festival’s major features.
Not tracked were visits to the neon heart display on Lakeside Drive or the nearby Tom Patterson Theatre. A historically popular weekend for the festival was also wiped out over the holidays when a major winter storm in Southwestern Ontario closed Perth County’s roads.
“Despite that, I think we did very well,” said Gribble, adding the number of total visits tracked was slightly higher than last year. “Feedback from the community and from initial conversations … with businesses, particularly downtown, has been extremely positive.”
Destination Stratford launched the city’s first winter lights festival three years ago as it began a push to expand tourism options outside of Stratford’s world-renowned theater season. That continues to be the goal – more than 50 per cent of the visits tracked by festival staff were by people from communities farther than 40 kilometers away, Gribble said.
“I’m very satisfied with how we did,” Gribble said. “In general terms, travel is still somewhat disrupted as we recover from the pandemic. We’re seeing less people from south of the border and that’s not just us, (that’s) the tourism industry in the province and country.”
Offering access to light displays that haven’t yet been seen elsewhere in the province has been part of the festival’s draw, Gribble added, and this year was no different.
The display in Market Square – The Pool, by Jen Lewin – made its Ontario debut during this year’s festival. Affinity, a display from Australia showcased on Tom Patterson Island, made its North American premiere in Stratford. LightWall, designed in Stratford and developed by British Columbia-based Limbic Media, was brand new.
“We are very keen on Stratford representing new works that are being premiered in this part of the world,” Gribble said. “I think that was really, highly successful. That’s part of the formula moving forward.”
The biggest addition to the festival this year might not have been one of the festival’s major displays, however. Free cabs and shuttle buses available to bring people to the festival’s major locations were very successful this year, Gribble said.
“The fact that it was free, that it uses city transit, and that it’s fully accessible is really, in hindsight, something we should have been doing from the get-go,” he said, adding that other cities have asked for more information about the partnerships that made those services possible. “This will always be incorporated moving forward.”
Now that this year’s displays have been taken down, staff have already started turning their attention to next year
“We are already knee deep in planning,” Gribble said. “It’s grown into something that the community really embraces.”