FAM Tour Visit by Nova Scotia Visitor Information Staff to Whitman Wharf House Bed and Breakfast, Canso, May 27th 2008.

Nova Scotia FAM tour participants at Whitman Wharf House Bed and Breakfast

Banding lobster claws at Whitman Wharf house Bed and Breakfast Canso

Showing the differences between male and female lobster

Lobster fishermen, Juanita and Pat talk to the Nova Scotia FAM tour

Minister Bill Dooks bringing carrots and a stick to the TIANS AGM at Liscombe Lodge, Eastern Shore

The Minister for Tourism, Bill Dooks, arrived at the TIANS AGM breakfast meeting at Liscombe Lodge, (May 24th 2008), with something of a “carrot and stick” approach.

Listing several substantive contibutions since taking office as Minister of Tourism, including more financial support for RTIA’s, an amendment to the Seasonal Tourist Business Tax Incentive, and a pledge to partner with industry including TIANS, and the RTIA’s, his speech was consistently upbeat with a clear message that industry must lead, and government over -regulation must stop.

The Minister has come out to bat for the tourism industry with vigour, determination and a vision for the industry in Nova Scotia. But at the end of his speech the carrots and the bat were exchanged for the stick, in his warning to industry that the repeal of the Tourist Accomodation Act, (TAA) must go through.

It appears that opposition to the repeal of the act by some sectors of the industry is sufficient to cause concern. Getting rid of the TAA is all part of the new government strategy to stop the tail wagging the dog. It is a strategy that has already been adopted in six provinces.

Now, the way I see it, over-regulation stifles industry. The complete repeal of the act though leaves me wondering what impact deregulation will have on my business. I suspect not a great deal because non-licensed B&Bs have been operating in the market place for years and I have already had to account for this in my marketing. Will there now be a flood of new unlicensed B&Bs into the marketplace? Probably- and this may be the reason that NSBBA’s president John Meehan opposes the deregulation.

If the tourism sector was more vibrant I suspect that the issue of the repeal of the TAA would not be so contentious. If in fact government were indeed able to deliver on the promise made by Bill Dooks just days after his appointment at AESTA’s AGM on October 30th 2007 at Liscombe, “It is up to government to bring customers to your doorstep,” I am certain that there would be far less opposition to the repeal.

In talking to B&B operators, I have discovered that many feel as I do- they feel that they have been left to market their businesses and indeed their regions and the province themselves. There is a sense of isolation, abandonment and a perception of disregard for what the B&B industry brings to the tourism industry.

I raised the issue of advertising  costs last year in October in Antigonish at the “Let’s Talk Tourism” initiative when the new NS branding was floated across the province. The cost of advertising for small operators was prohibitive I said. This year I planned to drastically cut back on advertising and to maintain only my own online presence.

I have in fact deviated somewhat from that original plan and gone out on a limb to attend every possible course and meeting made available by TIANS, and my RTIA. I have networked more, participated in a few cluster marketing initiatives and generally tried to be engaged as much as possible in the industry and take advantage of everything that is currently on offer. TIANS new masterclass series of workshops included Todd Lucier’s worshop on e-marketing, and was an absolutely amazing experience. The advertising costs for packages on www.novascotia.com have been reduced and the listings for B&Bs dramatically enhanced.

“So, how is all this working for me?” Well, so far so good. I certainly have more ideas than time to implement those ideas.

I have also been pleased to see that almost all the issues that I had concerns about are part of TIANS stated objectives and that Minister Bill Dooks is seeking to elevate the awareness that government investment in the tourism industry through infrastructure, highways and advertising is essential to Nova Scotia’s economy  which contributes 1.3 Billion dollars to the provincial coffers.

So with so much that is positive going on, why do I feel somewhat uneasy about the election of new officers to the TIANS board and the failure of John Meehan, president of the NSBBA, to be re-elected? Certainly John’s supporters felt that the listing of his bio on the back sheet of the “TIANS Proposed Slate of Nominations for 2008/9 TIANS Board of Directors,” was not making it a level playing field for all candidates- who were essentially represented as those on the TIANS slate and “additional nominees”, John of course being “additional”.

With only 12 members on the board, it isn’t just a question of “well- did the best man win?” but also of industry representation. So I am posing the question, “Did John lose his position on the TIANS board because he was opposed to the repeal of the Tourist Accommodation Act?” If the answer to this is “yes”, then the NSBBA has just been steam-rollered and my concern is that my voice through NSBBA might possibly just have been silenced- which is more than a little disconcerting.

Thinking of getting a (tourism) website makeover?

 

The competitive wooing of online visitors has suddenly changed the need for an online presence from a necessity to an essential.

Three years ago, as the owner of a bed and breakfast, Whitman Wharf House Bed and Breakfast, at the edge of the world in Canso, Nova Scotia, I started business with the premise that I expected most of my business to come from online bookings.  

Despite being an online advocate for the tourism industry, even I have been astonished at how quickly it is evolving and also the increased competitiveness of tourism sites. The knock-on effect of constantly creating content for my own site is that I now have zero tolerance for poorly maintained sites, or sites that are difficult to navigate when I am the customer.

What am I looking for on a tourism website?

1. I am looking for websites that deliver not just the usual information on room, rates, etc. but are visually enticing and give a glimpse into what’s going on there, who’s doing what and what’s new.
2. I am definitely on the hunt for interesting photographs and this is what is sadly missing on a lot of websites. 
3. What I am not looking for is uniformity. I have checked out a number of websites lately that have clearly just come away from having an expensive makeover only to find that the same two Adirondack chairs are sitting there on the home page!
4. Authenticity is critical. My answer in creating an “authentic feel” to a tourism website is to take the photos myself rather than relying on a web designer’s selection from a stock photo file.
5. The other thing is that I want the photos to tell the story, convey the emotion and describe the experience. Even in the past year I have noticed a real shift in the way websites are becoming much more visually oriented with more photos and graphics and much less text.

How do I create photos for my website?

 

1. I use a free download, “IrfanView” from www.irfanview.com for simple cropping, colour and light adjustments, and for resizing images.
2. I find that photos look better on the website if they are lighter rather than darker, and I increase the color saturation levels by about +50 for more colorful images.
3. More recently I have experimented with banner style photo cropping, as above. If you like the look of a photo on a website and want to use that size, in pixels or inches, then right click on it, go to “properties” on the drop menu, and it will display the image information. You can then use this information in the Irfanview program to customize your photos, by going to “Image” on the tool bar, and select the  resize/resample on the drop down menu. Now you can resize your photo to the preferred size, entering the number of pixels or inches to give you a banner size or a square, or a more traditional shape.

Getting the (web design) help I need!

Heather Holm from HolmPage Productions, http://www.holmpage.com has been my web designer for the past two years. During that time we have established a wonderful working relationship as well as friendship. I value her advice on design and graphics but it is a mutual relationship of educating each other in the areas that we each have expertise in that has made it such a valuable partnership. I craft the content and Heather artfully displays it, enhances the graphics, gives technical advice on new ideas, and generally ensures that my website looks the way it does.

I have also been dabbling in blogging software since last year with www.cansoBreeze.com, an e-zine on “wordpress,” a blogging platform, from www.wordpress.com.

Switching from an e-zine style to blogging in “Elizabeth’s blog on the ocean,” is teaching me how to adapt my writing style, but in both cases I am using all those image editing skills on Irfanview.

Photos are not just a great way to entice visitors to convert from a “browser” to a “purchaser” they are also a great way of introducing new content onto your website providing that all the alt and meta tags are put in- something that the webcrawlers love and keep coming back for, which of course translates into greater exposure for your website by the web search engines and more web traffic.

Tourist “spotting” now a nationwide phenomenon

Tourism operators wondering how the 2008 season may be shaping up may have seen the reports below from the CBC and The Canadian Press. 

The reports show that the March 2008 figures for foreign visitors to Canada are 12.4% lower than a year ago.

While visitors from the US make up a large proportion of this decline, there are declining numbers from Germany,  but gains from Italy and the Netherlands. The number of overseas visits to Canada fell by 3 per cent in March 2008 to 384,000.

With one in ten jobs related to the tourism sector in Canada, the tourism figures are beginning to make national headlines. Operators, on the other hand, have experienced the challenges of doing business in an ever increasingly competitive market ever since 9/11. 

“Tourist spotting,” rather like bird spotting, has been a local phenomenon in small coastal communities, like Canso in Nova Scotia, for some time. This sport is now apparently becoming a national phenomenon as gas prices and our exchange rate relative to European currencies and to the US dollar have changed foreign visitors’ perception of their purchasing power.

After SARS, Toronto’s tourism sector was decimated. With that hardened 20-20 vision of the SARS experience, Toronto has re-emerged as an industry leader in the tourism sector, positioning itself at the luxury end of the spectrum and being unabashed that their hotel rates now have the eighth highest ADR (average daily rate) worldwide.

In Nova Scotia, our learning curve may be a little flatter. Operators are confronted with the anomaly of having to position themselves between two much more divergent markets than Toronto experiences, the domestic and the foreign.

Despite the tourism research findings that pricing is apparently the fifth or sixth consideration in selecting a tourism destination, experienced market researchers in other industries make allowances for the mismatch between what consumers say they do and what they actually do.

So although people may answer a questionnaire with answers that indicate that a number of other factors are more important than price, when it actually comes to making their reservations, price may suddenly take a flying leap towards the top of the list.

This discrepancy is much more likely to have a direct impact on the domestic than on the foreign market: the domestic market is essentially a fixed entity while the foreign market comprises a constantly changing profile of various countries depending on their relative economic success in any given year.

The domestic market may just turn out to be a whole lot more price sensitive than we have been led to believe it is, just at a time when the tourism marketing mantra is “go luxury, go niche.’

The “propensity to spend,” issue is also a little more nuanced. While the propensity to spend may depend more on the visitor’s experiential rating than on the visitor’s gross income, it does assume that you have already managed to lure the visitor to your destination.

 

Referenced articles:

CBC – The number of foreign visitors to Canada in March was the lowest since record-keeping began in 1972, Statistics Canada said Tuesday.

About 2.26 million visits to this country were recorded that month, down 12.6 per cent from the same month a year earlier.

A big drop in American visitors was behind the decline. Only 730,000 same-day car trips were made by U.S. motorists in March. That was down 2.5 per cent from the month before and a 24 per cent plunge from a year ago as the price of gas, a high Canadian dollar and a weak U.S. economy kept Americans close to home.

The number of overseas visits fell by 3 per cent to 384,000.

“Travel declined in eight of Canada’s top 12 overseas markets, with the strongest decreases in travel from Mexico, Germany and Hong Kong,” said Statistics Canada.

Canadians, on the other hand, were showing no reluctance to travel, as the number of out-of-country trips rose in every category.

Canadians made 2.1 million same-day car trips to the U.S. in March, up 1.5 per cent from February and an increase of 9.5 per cent from year-ago levels.

The total number of trips to the U.S. rose to 3.8 million.

 ”The level of Canadian travel to the United States observed in the past six months has been the highest since 1998,” Statistics Canada reported.

 Overnight plane trips to the U.S. hit a new record high for the fourth month in a row.

 Travel by Canadians to countries other than the U.S. also hit a record high

 

The Canadian Press – OTTAWA – Travel to Canada hit a record low for the fifth straight month in March, following big declines in both same-day car trips from the United States and the number of visitors from overseas nations.

Statistics Canada reports foreign visitors made 2.3 million trips to Canada in March, the lowest since record keeping started in 1972.

That’s a one per cent decline from February, and a 12.4 per cent drop from a year earlier.

Meanwhile, the number of Canadian trips abroad rose 1.4 per cent to almost 4.5 million, the vast majority (85 per cent) to the United States.

U.S. residents made only 730,000 same-day car trips to Canada in March, down 2.5 per cent from the previous month.

Same-day car travel to Canada has fallen by 41.1 per cent in two years.

Overseas travellers to Canada made 384,000 trips in March, down three per cent.

Travel declined in eight of Canada’s top 12 overseas markets, with the strongest decreases in travel from Mexico, Germany and Hong Kong.

There were gains in visitors from India, Italy and the Netherlands.

Overall, Canadians made 3.8 million trips to the United States in March, up 1.6 per cent from February. Canadian travel to the United States in the past six months has been the highest since 1998.

Same-day car travel to the United States increased 1.5 per cent to 2.1 million trips, while overnight car travel rose 1.9 per cent to 991,000 trips.

Overnight plane trips to the United States set a new record high for the fourth straight month.

Canadian travel to countries other than the United States increased 0.4 per cent to a record 670,000 – the 10th month in the past year in which a new record high was set.

Marketing the Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia

The RTIA that has been the key marketing anchor for the Eastern Shore, AESTA, is heading to Toronto for the Toronto Trade Show, opening on June 20th, as a morphed acronym. For the first time AESTA will be representing only the Eastern Shore and not Antigonish at the trade show, where it will form part of the Nova Scotia pavilion. The “A” has been taken out of AESTA!

Now for many AESTA operators, the split will seem logical. It has for many, always been a tentative marriage between the Eastern shore tourism operators and those from Antigonish, as far as where the focus for marketing the region is concerned.

The changes come as a result of the new tourism regions crafted by the Dept. of Tourism, Culture and Heritage and form the basis of the Nova Scotia’s 2008 Doer’s and Dreamer’s Guide.

More changes are coming though. At a meeting on May 7th at the DeCoste Centre in Pictou, the consultants for the three RTIA’s, AESTA, CNTA, and Pictou County, presented a new model for the proposed Destination Marketing Organization, (DMO) that has already been agreed to, at least in principle. With more than half of the participants present tourism operators from all three regions, the interest level in the new DMO model was keen.

The objective of the new DMO, as per the handout, “A New tourism Business model for Central/East/North Nova Scotia, is defined as:
-Establish the broader region as a defined tourism destination, with a strategy and business model to make it successful and sustainable in today’s changing and increasingly competitive marketplace.
-A key element is achieving a sufficient and sustainable funding base.

It wasn’t long though before the realization that the “sustainable funding base” has to come from somewhere- and in the proposed model it comes in the form of a levy or as a Destination Marketing Fee- that there was some disagreement as to where that funding base should come from: “Who me?”

Based on the larger fixed roof accommodations, ie. accommodations with more than 20 rooms, the levy or DMF method of collecting marketing funds for the DMO assumes that industry leaders in the tourism sector will take the lead in the new DMO.

Certainly there are few who would say that Cape Breton’s marketing strategy for the region has not been successful. This, it would seem is the opportunity for AESTA, (without the “A”,) Central Nova, and Pictou County to bring some of the same aggressive marketing strategies as Cape Breton manages, for our region’s operators.

Now to give you some idea of the dog eat dog tourism marketplace just in Ontario, we have seen a dramatic increase in the TV advertising there over the past few months of 2008. Not only has Ontario stepped up its own advertising campaign to keep Ontarians within the province, but other provinces have also stepped in with dramatically increased marketing initiatives over previous years. Add to that the newer markets, like Egypt, and the further afield but yes- we would like some of the Ontarian tourism pie, such as California, and New Jersey, and Ontario has become “the jewel in the crown” to fight for, as far as tourism marketing goes.

Over the winter months there was however a total absence of any TV advertising for Nova Scotia in Ontario, despite the NB, PEI and Newfoundland campaigns- all strong, especially Newfoundland, and the new campaigns by NJ, BC, Egypt, LA, California, Australia and Ireland. Ireland was also a very strong advertising campaign. Hawaii is another recent destination competing for TV spots in Ontario. Of course, this list doesn’t yet include the regular campaigns still to come from Quebec, NY, Florida, South Carolina and Virginia. Nor does it include the sporadic TV campaigns of previous years from Texas, Vermont, Colorado and New Mexico. Clearly all these destinations recognize that Ontario affords a high population density, (40% of the national market,) of which half is in the Greater Toronto Area, (GTA). It also has a high medium income, and a population that is used to travelling.

I personally noted that my web traffic was up at its highest ever in March 2008. This may indeed have been the result of one snow storm after another in Ontario but that isn’t the whole story. In February 2008, DRUM played to enchanted Toronto audiences. The subsequent snow storms in Ontario certainly helped convert some of this enchantment into tourism business for Nova Scotia, I am sure. A peak in my own web stats usually occurs as a direct result of a marketing initiative. I am sure that the same is true on a provincial scale. So clearly we need a strong DMO for our region that has the funding base for major advertising campaigns and which can compete in an ever more complex marketing landscape.

   

Experiential Travel-a sustainable tourism model.

I recently attended a workshop on “Experiential Travel Product Development,” put on by TIANS for Nova Scotia’s travel industry.

With Nancy Arsenault and Celes Davar, as the facilitators, it was no surprise to find how the concept of “experiential” was taken to be the fulcrum of the workshop: “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.”

What amazed me was just how experiential the workshop turned out to be with Dave Carroll’s performance of “Now,” from his new album “Perfect Blue,” followed by an opportunity for all the participants to engage in an unforgettable experience to learn a segment of the music to “DRUM:” The workshop participants were divided into groups, each group being led through a practice of black African drumming, Micmac drumming and singing, and Acadian style wooden spoon playing. Finally the entire ensemble was put together and a surprisingly good rendition of part of “DRUM” re-created.

The initial trepidation on Brookes Diamond’s face, artistic director of “DRUM,”  gave way to delightfully good humoured smiles as the distinctive rhythms of early settlers’, blacks, Acadian and Micmac music blended in an awesome recreation of the show’s music.

As I drove the three hour journey home from Truro to Canso, I reflected on the highly unusual approach to the workshop taken by  Celes Davar and Nancy Arsenault. They had taken all of us through an experiential  journey of some of Nova Scotia’s best musical heritage and cuisine, while at the same time crafting the workshop as a “learning” experience.

Surprised as I was to hear from Glen Squires’ own lips that as CEO of Pacrim Hospitality Services, (which includes the Canada wide chain of Holiday Inns), he faces the same challenges as I experience as a small bed and breakfast operator, specifically the short summer season that runs from the second week in July to the third week in August and then from the second week in September until the Celtic colours festival: It was almost comforting at one level to know that tourism operators right across the board are seeking new opportunities to find ways to develop new business propositions.

Providing opportunities for experiential travel is a way for operators to enter into a new sustainable tourism model. Sensitive to the psychographics of the traveller, travel experiences are provided to highly targeted niche markets. The emphasis is on providing inherently personal and memorable travel experiences which engage all of the senses; touch, smell, taste, hearing and sight, and allow the visitor to “feel” a connection on an emotional, physical, spiritual or intellectual level. The visitor is engaged in a way that they “feel” as if they have stepped behind the scenes, discovered the authentic stories and interacted with the local communities.

As the owner/operator of a bed and breakfast I can relate to almost everything that I heard at the workshop: There is something inherently experiential about many bed and breakfasts which guests seek out! There is however a new challenge to meet for small tourism businesses as the market is driven by a highly sophisticated and well informed consumer base. From the nine different potential “Explorer Quotients” or EQ’s,( http://www.canada.travel/eq ) today’s visitor has a specificity for interests and style of travel, ranging from the “No-Hassle traveller” to the “Free Spirit,” the “cultural explorer,” and the “authentic experiencer.” The small operator now needs to partner with other businesses and people in the community as do the larger tourism operators to satisfy the requirements of these new demands, particularly those coming from the “X” and “Y” generations.

The new experiential travel business model becomes especially interesting for rural communities in Nova Scotia. Rural communities who have suffered the loss of vibrant economies often still have a wealth of traditional skills, arts, music and ways of knowing that have not previously been tapped into on an economic scale. There is now the growing opportunity for small rural communities to market this knowledge base within a sustainable tourism framework.