Transportation company changing lanes

In any other winter, if the Icefields Parkway closes for Parks Canada avalanche control work, SunDog Transportation and Tours owner, Paul Hardy, spends the day on the phone.

Often his passengers are coming from, or going to, the airport in Calgary, and if his SunDog buses can’t utilize the parkway, Hardy and his staff have to reroute folks through Edmonton, organizing drivers in Banff in Calgary and generally mucking up his day so his customers’ trips can continue uninterrupted.

“In a typical year when the parkway gets closed it’s a lot of juggling,” Hardy said.

This year, when 30 cm of snow fell on the south highway January 13 and Parks Canada closed the road, because SunDog’s bus schedule has been severely reduced, instead of juggling, Hardy went skiing.

“If I have to look for a silver lining that would be one of them,” he acknowledged. “But I’d much rather have visitors moving around, borders open and people on vacation.”

As a business created to focus on Jasper’s international tourism market, SunDog has been one of Jasper’s hardest-hit companies in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Hardy built out SunDog Transportation and Tours to weather the expected ups and downs of different visiting markets—indeed one of SunDog’s strengths as a business has been its diversity. However, never could he have guessed that international travel would come to a stop across the entire globe. 

“Do you ever forecast all of [the international markets] going away during the same time?” he said. “No.”

In March, when the pandemic was first declared, Hardy and his team were focusing on operating in a limited capacity, within the (albeit fluid) guidelines of local health authorities. He need to know how many passengers could he transport and the steps his drivers needed to take to ensure their guests were safe. 

He knew SunDog’s wildlife tours would suffer out of the gate, but during a time when domestic travel was discouraged, when hospitals were deferring appointments and when no one was visiting their family members, the transportation side of the  business presented challenges at every junction. As a result, Hardy had to lay off the bulk of his staff—about 45 employees. Today, he’s operating with about 35 per cent of his pre-COVID contingent.

“At a very best scenario our busses are operating at 50 per cent [occupancy],” he said. 

To stop the bleeding, SunDog, like many businesses in Jasper, took advantage of the government supports, including the federal wage subsidies, but Hardy knew he had to start rethinking his business model for the immediate future. He knew regional visitors to Jasper weren’t as liable to book a trip to Maligne Lake or covet his guides’ wildlife interpretation—he knew Albertans would simply drive themselves around the park. In response, he started asking himself how SunDog could pivot from providing a small part of an individual tourist’s itinerary, to encapsulating a family’s full vacation package.

“We were thinking of it A to Z rather than certain components,” he explained.

As a result, SunDog has created partnerships with accommodation and activity providers. 

“I think we’ve become better at lots of things and that we’ll continue with a lot of these things when international travel comes back,” he said.

But by no means is Hardy discounting the importance of the regional guest. In fact, Hardy hopes that similar to this past summer, 2021 will continue to open Albertans’ eyes to the accessibility and the beauty of Jasper National Park. He hopes that their experiences this year will sow the seeds of repeat visits.

“This has been an incredible opportunity from a regional awareness standpoint,” Hardy said. “In a pandemic, Jasper is a pretty good place to social distance.”