A new word-of-mouth marketing program has B.C. residents watching Tourism Vancouver’s morning updates this month to take advantage of more than 30,000 daily deal-style free tickets to local attractions.
“We’re very conscious of the fact that it’s locals who are the ones influencing their friends’ and families’ decisions when they’re visiting Vancouver,” said Amber Sessions, Tourism Vancouver’s manager of travel and trade media relations.
“They’re the ones who are saying to their mom who’s in town or to their cousins, ‘Hey I was just at the Capilano Suspension Bridge, it’s fantastic, we should go together, you’d love it.’”
The campaign, Be a Tourist in Your Own Town, is a joint initiative between Tourism Vancouver and participating local attractions. It provides B.C. locals with free tickets to participating venues as a way to boost the sites’ profiles during the upcoming tourist season.
Every morning, free tickets to a different Vancouver-area attraction are featured on the Tourism Vancouver website at 7 a.m. and highlighted through Tourism Vancouver’s Facebook and Twitter feeds.
Those tickets are valid for the following day. The program kicked off with the first free visits occurring May 3; the final visiting day will be May 29.
The Bloedel Floral Conservatory, Gulf of Georgia Cannery National Historic Site, Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, Vancouver Art Gallery and Vancouver Maritime Museum are among 27 participating attractions.
Sessions noted that Tourism Vancouver previously ran a Be a Tourist campaign in 1994, but that program differed significantly from this year’s model in that it was a three-day promotion that offered $10 “passports” to a range of attractions.
She noted that the current Be a Tourist program is channelling the same word-of-mouth approach used successfully for more than a decade by the tourism industry’s Tourism Challenge, which offers free admissions and deals to local attractions and hotels for qualifying tourism industry personnel.
She added that Be a Tourist was dreamt up locally, rather than taking inspiration from other cities’ approaches.
“We aren’t aware of cities doing the exact thing that we’re doing,” she said.
Attractions that have already been featured by the program are enthusiastic.
“That day went really well,” said Gerry O’Neil, president of Stanley Park Horse-Drawn Tours. On May 3 the company provided 125 free pairs of tickets for a one-hour narrated tour of Stanley Park in a horse-drawn carriage.
O’Neil said he saw a 77% redemption rate of the coupons, including a few people who asked if the company would honour the coupons the day prior (it did) and a few people who showed up after May 3.
The latter group, he said, was provided with rain checks to be used by month’s end, plus a two-for-one deal for additional friends.
He commented that he’d opted to play it safe on numbers for the first year, to see how it went.
“Obviously if we’re going to have to turn too many people away that are full-paying, then we need to revise,” he said.
But as it turned out, with numbers down slightly thanks to less than perfect weather, no full-paying customers had to be turned away.
O’Neil said that the company would definitely participate in the program in future years. He also said that he would be open to upping the number of tickets offered, given that capacity did not prove to be a problem this year.
Carol Watts, operations manager for the Britannia Mine Museum, also spoke well of the program, saying that the museum would happily participate another year.
This despite the fact that Britannia, the first attraction to be featured in the program, saw a low, 17% redemption rate (30 visitors) on its coupons.
According to Sessions, people initially appeared to be downloading coupons to test out the system. She noted that redemption levels have been building as the program moves forward.
But Watts said even the limited turnout to her museum “was 30 people on a Tuesday that we would not normally get.”
She added that Britannia, which last year completed a $14 million renovation, gained exposure even where downloaded coupons weren’t redeemed.
“The fact that the people went to the trouble of printing [the coupons] off and reading about us and thinking that they might be able to come is one of the reasons why we participated,” she said. “It gets the word out.”
Sessions said that once the promotion wraps up, Tourism Vancouver will assess whether Be a Tourist has a future beyond this year’s promotion.
“We’ll listen to what the attractions have to say about how well they thought it worked and we’ll decide if it’s something we want to pursue the following year.”