Vancouver Coast & Mountains’ 2008 Regional Tourism Leaders Forum

VentureWeb made the long journey to the Vancouver Coast & Mountains’ 2008 Regional Tourism Leaders Forum held in Tsawassen, June 11-12. Despite Jamie’s best efforts to get us lost and subsequent detours, Jim was able to steer us to our desired destination and roughly on time.

The early departure from Squamish prompted some rapid coffee consumption before we settled in for the first session. And a very informative session it was. Packaging (nothing to do with Christmas presents) and product distribution methods for travel products, facilitated by Eva Gutsche, Tourism BC.

There are a number of real pluses to attending conferences. One is the complimentary paper and pens and Tsawassen didn't disappoint. While on the topic of stationary we met the very inventive Gil Yaron form a company called Frog File who have developed a fantastic line of "Green Office Products."

A number of print media companies presented at the conference. All were unified in voice that print media is still the best way to deliver messages into the hands of travelers! What a load of old tripe. Interestingly, many of these went on to promote their newly revamped advertising and listings web sites! Hmm.

Tourism BC revealed their online strategies for delivering a better product for web users interested in coming to BC. Much as we try not to sound too nerdy this was of real interest to us here at VentureWeb.

The big guns from Tourism BC outlined details of changes ahead for the nine tourism regions, which included decommissioning the member (partner) listings sections of the each regions web site and moving this over to HelloBC.com.

Tourism BC went on to describe this migration of individual operator information to their web site in great detail. They also outlined (albeit vaguely) the introduction of their new online booking engine. Which has been a very large project that they have invested heavily in.

In summary, the BC Government is moving towards a revenue oriented business model for HelloBC.com. The means from which they intend to derive revenues are operator listings and a booking engine which will dominate tourism bookings in the province.

The conference entertainment was great – perhaps a little too good, as I am sure others will attest! I have to say that my only gripe was the food. Perhaps I am just being picky!

Day two’s session on search engine optimization and marketing for Tourism Businesses was very interesting. Understandably the material presented was entry level in order to not loose those people to whom the concept is new. The real point of interest for VentureWeb was gauging the level of participation in web marketing within the group. Despite numerous presentations that all clearly underlined increased bottom line as a direct result of online marketing, a quick show of hands revealed that not one company was spending more than ten percent of their total marketing budget on web site marketing. Come-on people!

Clearly there is still much work to be done to get this industry to start putting real money into online promotions, search engine marketing, email marketing and web site design and development.

Our goal at VentureWeb is to ensure that our Tourism industry partners understand the overall processes and are better equipped to make informed choices for their business.

All in all VentureWeb had a thoroughly good time. We met lots of interesting people and learned a lot. Thanks so much to the hard working staff at VCM for putting on such a great confernece. We are already looking forward to next year!