The Cariboo Chilcotin Coast Tourism Association will be hosting a Wildfire Rural Tourism Symposium this weekend in Williams Lake.

“The reason why the event is happening this weekend is because we’re looking back on last year’s event from the summer and we realize that there a lot of opportunities for us to share our knowledge whether it’s the tourism sector, whether it’s emergency management, whether it’s wildfire,” says emcee Jason Ryll.

“There’s a lot of opportunities for us to share the knowledge that we learned from last year and this is that opportunity.”

Ryll says that they are expecting about 60 people to be in attendance at the public meeting that is targeted towards tourism stakeholders, industry professionals, and elected officials.

“They’re coming from all over the province and from different sectors,” says Ryll.

“We’ve got representatives coming from Emergency Management BC, reps coming from TRU and their tourism education department, reps coming from the Ministry of Tourism, Arts, and Culture, we have lawyers, people from pr firms that are going to be coming as far as how to craft the message on wildfire recovery and incidents like this, and also the CEO of the Tourism Industry Association of BC.”

The City of Williams Lake will kick off the weekend to the Symposium with an open house and festivities taking place at the Tourism Discovery Centre tonight from 7pm-9pm.

The Wildfire Rural Tourism Symposium runs this weekend at the Gibraltar room.