With thousands of people flocking to St. Albert for the World Financial Group Continental Cup, last weekend was a good one for local businesses who saw increased revenue thanks to the well-televised international event.
According to Diane Enger, facility director at Servus Credit Union Place, the event resulted in 30 hours of TSN coverage and more than 20,000 people passing through the facility over four days last week.
“It’s just a great event for spectators and our facility is a great facility to host those kinds of events. The 2,000 seats is a perfect number of seats for the kind of event that the Continental Cup brought,” Enger said.
“It was very successful and we were very proud to be the host venue for them.”
Enger said the event was especially good for those businesses located inside the facility.
“Any business owner would like a couple more weekends like that of course,” said Kevin Chehade, owner of the Skybox Grill at Servus Place.
In addition to serving hundreds of spectators who had tickets to last weekend’s competition, Chehade said the restaurant also provided meals for those playing hockey, soccer and visiting the fitness centre at Servus Place.
He said staff at Skybox also provided two meals for the TSN crew and catered the volunteer banquet, which included close to 300 volunteers.
“That went over very, very well,” Chehade said.
“We kept everything nice and hot and everything came out of the kitchen really well.”
Chehade said he needed to hire an additional 12 employees on top of his usual eight to work the weekend event.
“Overall a facility that can hold 2,500 people at one time or 3,000 at one time, for one kitchen and one operator like me to handle that, I think this weekend was a successful weekend for us,” he said.
Ray Davidson, owner of the Booster Juice located inside Servus Place said last weekend’s Continental Cup was good for his business as well.
“Any time you can throw different possibilities that generate traffic and different people, it’s always healthy and good for the facility in the long run,” he said.
Charlene Zoltenko, chair of the St. Albert & District Chamber of Commerce, said the city’s two largest hotels, Best Western and St. Albert Inn, were full last weekend thanks to the event.
“Over 70 per cent of the tickets that were sold were outside of our postal code so it brought that number of people into our community, which is really good,” said Zoltenko, who volunteered at a souvenir booth on Saturday. She said volunteers travelled from several provinces and several U.S. states to help out.
“I thought it was a really good event and there were over 300 volunteers and that’s challenging for a community as well, pulling all those volunteers in,” said Zoltenko.
She said two local restaurants — Golden Dynasty and The Rink — provided food for The Patch, a pub set up at Servus Place as part of the Continental Cup.
According to Zoltenko, all of the alcohol sold at The Patch was purchased at the Campbell Liquor Store and the event’s main clothing booth hired several local workers by placing an ad in the Gazette.
“Hopefully this event will lead us to further events because that’s good for everybody,” she said.
Rob LeLacheur, general manager of the Apex Casino, said pamphlets handed out to spectators on Thursday and Friday, as part of the facility’s promotional booth at Servus Place, resulted in increased traffic over the weekend.
“Things were fairly busy. We definitely attributed lots of that to the Continental Cup,” he said.
Larry Horncastle, director of business and tourism development for the City of St. Albert said the significant media attention — 30 hours of TSN coverage — that the city received during the Cup helped publicize the city’s name.
“I don’t think if somebody heard ‘St. Albert’ on TSN they’re going to pick up and move their company here but it reinforces and the more times they hear it, they think, ‘Things are happening there, we could check into it,’” said Horncastle.
“It was just a great showcase for St. Albert, a great showcase for Servus Credit Union Place and a great showcase for the curling club and the businesses involved. I think they all got some mileage out of it and I think that was fantastic.”
