The federal and provincial governments each have new strategies to get the best possible bang for each tax buck spent encouraging tourists to visit B.C.
The plans could alter priorities within:
•the Canadian Tourism Commission’s $72 million budget;
•Tourism BC’s $52 million budget; and
•Tourism Vancouver’s $12 million budget.
The organizations partner with each other on marketing campaigns, so changes in one’s priorities have broad impact on all three.
The new government strategies come as B.C. struggles to attract international tourists.
The number of overnight international visitors to B.C. has returned to the pre-Olympic downward trajectory.
According to the Canadian Tourism Commission, during 2011’s first eight months, the number of overnight international visitors to B.C. fell by more than 200,000 compared with the same period in 2009.
B.C. attracted more than four million international overnight visitors in 2009. That number that was almost 10% lower than in 2008 and, except for 2010, has decreased each year since 2004.
Lingering international economic turmoil undoubtedly convinced many tourists to stay home. But the disappointing visitor counts prompted Premier Christy Clark last month to revise former Premier Gordon Campbell’s 2004 pledge for the province to double annual tourism revenue to $18 billion by 2015.
B.C. tourism revenue hit $13.4 billion in 2010. Clark wants to increase that figure by 5% annually until it hits $18 billion in 2016.
Her tourism strategy aims to:
•narrow Tourism BC’s focus to marketing products such as touring vacations, aboriginal tourism and outdoor adventure – areas where she believes B.C. has a natural advantage;
•target money at key markets such as California, Ontario, Japan and the United Kingdom while ramping up spending in emerging markets such as China, India and Mexico; and
•potentially replace Tourism BC with a new provincial destination marketing organization.
Ottawa’s comparatively simple plan is to do a better job of co-ordinating the 15 federal departments and agencies that have tourism-related initiatives to attract visitors and take a “whole-of-government” approach similar to those in Australia and New Zealand.
All those departments will focus on:
•increasing awareness of Canada’s stature as a premier tourist destination;
•making border access easy and safe;
•encouraging investments in tourism assets; and
•training hospitality workers.
Where does the money go?
Tourism industry insiders say it’s impossible to gauge whether current spending for tourism marketing effectively encourages tourists to visit B.C. because there is a maze of overlapping initiatives.
Potential visitors also employ a subtle decision-making process when finalizing vacation decisions. The result is that investments can take time to pay off.
Investing in building relationships with conference organizers, for example, can reap huge dividends down the road, explained Tourism Vancouver executive vice-president Paul Vallee.
“A lot of our investing is in people,” he told Business in Vancouver. “Some of our staff have been here 15 or 20 years. They know meeting-planner customers so well that they even know their children.”
Vallee’s organization divides its $12 million budget geographically and by market segment.
Tourism Vancouver invests:
•$3.5 million annually to attract conventions and meetings to the city;
•$2.5 million to attract leisure travellers;
•$2 million on either direct advertising or communications initiatives with travel media and travel agents; and
•$2 million to pay for the capital cost of the new convention centre.
Vallee carefully watches international visitor counts, but he’s aware that most tourists in B.C. live in the province.
Tourism BC stats show that of the 15 million annual tourist vists to B.C.:
•about 52% are British Columbians;
•20% are from the rest of Canada; and
•28% are from other countries.
More than two-thirds of B.C.’s international visitors (69%) are American. Asians make up about 15% of B.C.’s international visitors, about 13% of which are European.
“The first thing you look at when determining to spend money in a market is whether you can get the people here. Are there direct flights?” Vallee said.
“To say that there’s a booming economy in Brazil so we should be marketing to Brazil, well, that doesn’t work if they can’t get here easily.”
Efforts are underway to encourage Transport Canada to approve direct flights between Vancouver and Brazil.
Efficiencies from economies of scale enable Tourism Vancouver and Tourism BC to spend slightly less than the 69% of their international marketing dollars to attract the 69% of international visitors who are American.
They use those savings to spend slightly more per visitor to attract tourists from Europe. Tourism Vancouver spends slightly less per visitor to attract Asian visitors although Vallee said he expects spending in Asia to rise. He added that Tourism Vancouver’s extra spending in Europe is largely a result of that continent staging more international conventions. Tourism BC similarly spends more per visitor in Asia and Europe than it does in the U.S.
“I would love to be able to say whether the money is targeting those areas because that’s where the tourists come from or that the tourists come from those areas because that’s where the money is being spent,” said Tourism B.C. director of North American marketing Carol Nelson.
Both she and Vallee stress that their organizations’ recent shift to spending more heavily outside the U.S. is not a sign that they’re abandoning their bread-and-butter international market.
Instead, they say that it is because they can reap synergies from Internet-based campaigns.
“So much of what we do is online that it’s difficult to say that we spend this much in Canada and this much in the U.S.,” Nelson said.
She added that Tourism B.C. invests about 75% of its budget in attracting North American visitors. At Tourism Vancouver, that figure is closer to 79% – even though the North American market accounts for about 91% of B.C.’s visitors.
Vancouver-based CTC has the largest budget ($72 million) and is the least transparent about where it spends its money. CTC spokeswoman Margaret Nevin told BIV in an email that her commission spends all of its marketing dollars to attract international visitors to Canada. But she declined to reveal how or where the CTC spends those dollars because of “competitive reasons.”
“International tourism is fiercely competitive and competitors (i.e. other countries wanting to attract travellers) pay for information about how much competitors are spending, and where, on tourism,” she wrote.
Current campaigns
The theme of Tourism BC’s latest campaign is “Get above it all in B.C.”
The $1.1 million investment is the organization’s annual ski campaign, which is targeted at residents in Toronto, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington state.
“We’re doing a short-term promotional stunt – transforming escalators into ski lifts and transforming elevators into immersive ski resort experiences,” Nelson said.
Most of the campaign involves online advertising on ski-related websites and media, such as the Weather Network. Web surfers click through the advertising to www.discoverbcski.com – a Tourism BC-run website that has additional links so visitors can click through to resort websites.
Because the U.K. is B.C.’s top international source for tourists outside the U.S., a future Tourism BC campaign is slated to target London.
It’s also an example of how tourism-promotion organizations partner with each other and private companies.
The London initiative is co-sponsored by Tourism B.C., Tourism Vancouver, Tourism Whistler and Virgin Airlines, which recently announced that, starting in May 2012, it will offer four flights a week between Vancouver and London’s Heathrow airport.
Tourism measures returns on marketing investments such as the $4.2 million “Don’t miss a moment” campaign, which ran from May to October, was largely Internet-based and targeted visitors in B.C., Alberta, Washington, Ontario and California.
“Our results were very positive,” Nelson said. “We generated over 160,000 page views of our special offers, over 175,000 visits to our trip ideas web pages and over 81,000 people entered our contest for a trip to B.C.” •
