Where Your Neighbors Work
By Bryan Pilbeam, Board Chair, Tourism Kamloops
Part 2 of 8 in the "What Tourism Builds For Us" series
When most people picture someone who works in tourism, they picture the same thing. A summer job. A patio shift. A few months at a front desk before something more serious comes along. Seasonal work for students and travellers passing through.
I get it. That image exists for a reason. But it doesn't come close to telling the whole story.
Think about what it actually takes to run a hotel. The buildings need engineers who know every mechanical system by heart. The finances need accountants managing cash flow across multiple properties with an eye on what's coming six months out. The calendar needs a sales team out every week chasing corporate accounts and convention bookings that fill a February just as well as a July. None of those are summer positions. Those are careers, and a lot of the people in them didn't set out to work in this industry at all.
That's one of the things I love most about it. A TRU student picks up a part-time shift to cover tuition and finds themselves five years later managing a department they never studied for. Someone new to Canada joins a team and works their way into a leadership role while building a life here. A young person from Kamloops takes a seasonal job expecting to leave and decides to stay because the work turned out to be more interesting than they thought, and because this city turned out to be more than they expected.
I know that last part firsthand.
When Kamloops first came across my radar, I wasn't convinced it was the right place to raise my family. I was living in Pemberton, working in Whistler after the 2010 Olympics, and when someone approached me about an opportunity here I just wasn't ready to see it. It took a second conversation and a friend telling me this was genuinely one of the best places he'd ever raised a family for me to take a closer look.
That was fifteen years ago. I haven't left.
What I found here was a city that was built to host people. The tournament facilities, the trails, the events infrastructure, the hotels and restaurants that stay busy enough to keep their doors open year-round. Those things didn't happen by accident. They grew because Kamloops became a place worth visiting, and over time that investment created something that benefits everyone who lives here too.
My children and their friends grew up on baseball diamonds, soccer pitches, football fields, and pool decks that would genuinely impress anyone who showed up not knowing what to expect. The Tournament Capital Centre alone has facilities that most cities three times our size would envy. I can hike six minutes from my office or catch a basketball game mid-afternoon and be back at my desk before the day is done. That's the life this city made available to me, and it's the same life that draws people into this industry and keeps them here.
And we're not done building. A new convention centre in Kamloops changes the math on year-round employment in a meaningful way. Business travel doesn't slow down in shoulder seasons the way leisure travel does. It fills the gaps, supports full-time positions, and sends a clear signal to the people working in this industry that there's a future here worth growing into.
When your neighbor tells you they work in tourism, they might be a student who found their footing. They might be someone who came here from another country and put down roots. They might be a longtime Kamloops local doing skilled, well-paying work in an industry that most people underestimate.
The trails, the facilities, the restaurants that stay open year-round, the events that fill our calendar. None of it runs without them. And this city is better for every one of them who chose to stay.
