When your tourism industry is hobbled by a high dollar that makes everything more expensive for visitors, a little luck certainly helps. That’s just what the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge offered when they chose this country for their first foreign tour earlier this summer.
“It was one of those delightful gifts that was handed to us on a silver platter,” says Greg Klassen, senior vice-president of marketing strategy for the Canadian Tourism Commission.
And the CTC, Canada’s national tourism marketing organization, was determined to capitalize.
The agency partnered with Sina.com, the largest Chinese-language “infotainment” web portal, to create a royal mini-site, and brought Chinese blogger Li Xuefeng, who has a viewship of 1.7 million, and Chinese celebrity photographer Zhang Lei to Canada to document the royal tour — and its iconic Canadian locations — for the vast Chinese audience.
According to a preliminary analysis by the CTC, those efforts generated a print “ad value equivalent” of $2 million worth of exposure in China. “And that’s just for starters,” says Klassen. “We’re still evaluating the outcomes of those results.”
The CTC also worked closely with British media who came to Canada to cover the tour, offering story ideas, background information and video. That helped generate “the kinds of experiences and photo ops that you simply can’t buy,” Klassen says.
Hello magazine, for example, ran a 25-page spread on the royal couple’s experiences in Canada. That and other coverage was worth the equivalent of more than £2 million, Klassen calculates.
Buoyed by the extensive coverage, the CTC has extended its advertising campaigns in Britain and Germany into early August, hoping to entice last-minute travellers with specially priced tour packages.
It’s too early to say whether all this will translate into more visitors. “Typically these kinds of things take anywhere from four months to a couple of years before they can actually track against performance,” Klassen says.
But if the 2010 Vancouver Olympics are any guide, the international exposure Canada gained from the royal visit should give the tourism sector a boost.
Following the global coverage of the Olympics, the number of British visitors to Canada doubled last year, as did the number of Australian tourists. Forty per cent more Germans came to Canada in 2010 than the previous year. Visitors from those three countries alone spent nearly $700 million, up $257 million from 2009, according to CTC figures.
The Vancouver Games also burnished Canada’s international image. Last November FutureBrand, a New York-based global brand consultancy firm, ranked Canada as the world’s No. 1 country brand, displacing the United States.
The international attention garnered by the royal visit and Olympics is more than just gravy for Canada’s tourism industry. Cultivating business from other markets is essential for its health and the jobs of the 600,000 people the industry employs.
Travel from Canada’s main tourism market, the United States, has been in decline for several years because of the high dollar, passport requirements and the continuing effects of the 2008 recession,
In May — the most recent month for which figures are available — same-day and overnight trips by Americans to Canada totalled just under 1.1 million, according to seasonally adjusted figures from Statistics Canada. Five years ago, the figure was more than 1.8 million. In the first four months of this year, U.S. crossings to Ontario decreased by 5.2 per cent.
At the same time, more Canadians are taking advantage of the dollar’s buying power to travel to the U.S. In May, nearly 3.4 million Canadians travelled by car to the U.S., about 600,000 more than the same month five years ago.
For tourism operators, it’s a double-whammy.
Leisure air travel is the only exception to the general decline in American visitors to Canada. It was up by 12 per cent in May compared to May of 2010, and has risen 3.6 per cent year to date.
Klassen says air travellers are “much more resilient” than tourists who drive. They tend to be wealthier, they already have passports and, if they live some distance from the Canada-U.S. border, they’re probably not particularly aware of the exchange rate, he says.
That worked to Canada’s disadvantage when the dollar was low and this country was a low-cost destination for Americans. “We had a hard time communicating that value proposition to them because they don’t typically spend their days, like we do, looking and seeing what the exchange rate is,” Klassen says. But that same lack of awareness may be helping now.
The weak American market hasn’t had much of an effect on the nation’s capital, according to Ottawa Tourism’s Jantine Van Kregten. “About 90 per cent of our visitors are Canadian. Only about five per cent are American.
“Of course we would like to see those numbers go up,” she adds, “but it’s not as dire a situation as some border communities might face.” Ottawa Tourism is working with the CTC and Ontario Tourism to market the capital in New York and Boston, Ottawa’s two key markets in the U.S.
Based on overnight accommodation, visits to Ottawa were up marginally in May, Van Kregten says. But she’s expecting a bounce when the June numbers come in. “With the royal visit, we know there will be a nice little spike around Canada Day.”
The CTC has largely moved out of the U.S. leisure travel market, though it remains active in the meeting and convention sector. Along with its scaled-down efforts in the U.S., it now focuses its marketing in 10 countries: Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, South Korea, Mexico and the UK.
China, expected to generate 100 million internationally travellers worldwide by 2020, is Canada’s biggest emerging market, Klassen says. The CTC launched its first major advertising campaign in China in February, after Canada won coveted Approved Destination Status there a year ago.
So far, the returns are encouraging. As of May, year-over-year visits by Chinese citizens to Canada were up 18 per cent. “We’re very aggressively marketing in that particular market,” says Klassen.
But visits from India, the other Asian colossus, have been flat. Klassen blames a lack of direct air connections and visa problems — a shortage of offices and slow processing of visa requests.
“We take baby steps in these markets as we start to develop them, but we see nothing but great upside and potential when we get through some of these challenges.”
