Downtown Halifax is attractive to visitors for many reasons. Aside from the city’s history alone, many come for the world-class attractions and events, Halifax’s Seaport, the Waterfront, and of course the unique and local restaurants and shops.

DHBC is dedicated to keeping our members, and stakeholders abreast of key vibrancy metrics for Downtown.

With that in mind, DHBC started purchasing cell phone data from a company called Environics, and four times a year they send us the latest visitation data that tracks total "visits" on a weekly basis and matches it to our BID boundary. 

November 1, 2023

2023 Q2 (July, August, September)
Key Highlights:

• July was down 4% vs last year.
• August was up 5%
• September was up 13%

Overall, it looks like a 5% increase in Q2 in 2023 over last year – so, GOOD NEWS! We topped 4M visitors in that time.

August 11, 2023

2023 Q1 (April, May and June)
Key Highlights:

• There was a total reduction of 5.42% in total visitation April-June 2023 vs the same period in 2022.
• Broken down by month, we had a 9% increase in April, followed by a 13% decrease in May and an 8% decrease in June.  

Commentary/analysis - June is not a surprise, given the weather and the impact of the wildfires (which resulted in significant cancelled tourism) but May is a bit of a mystery since we had several big events happening Downtown that month, including ECMA.

The other main tracking we monitor is the pedestrian (“footfall”) analysis out of the University of Toronto, also monitored through cell phone tracking.

• As of June 2023, Downtown Halifax has consistently had the second-best recovery (compared to 2019) of any large Canadian city, at 66%. This was down from a peak of 74% in February 2023.