These are all experiential travel opportunities included in the recent Cutting Edge Experiential Travel training offered in Onanole Manitoba. Welcoming 31 folks from the tourism industry, community and economic development organization and destination marketers we embarked on a 3.5 day journey to explore the potential for experiential travel in rural Manitoba. This is a tourism development opportunity that has relevance to all areas of Canada – rural to urban, north, south, east and west. It aligns with how the Canadian Tourism Commission is positioning Canada and is part of Travel Manitoba’s strategic direction.  Our job as operators is to ensure the product is there!

Where do you begin – start looking for the hidden gems in our community!  We found a few diamonds … take a peak at our course video! Then think about the potential for your own community.

If you live in Manitoba and missed this training opportunity – you are in luck!  Travel Manitoba is offering a second session, this time in an urban setting in Winnipeg Jan 16 – 20th. Contact Edge of the Wedge GMIST graduate, and now Cutting Edge graduate Laurenda Madill with the Visitor Experiences Development team for more information.

I am appreciating being involved as a tourism operator in a planning process to provide advice to Riding Mountain National Park about an eastern sector of the park, as part of their new approach to more broadly engaging stakeholders in a meaningful and productive conversation. This conversation involves a lot of very talented people, with backgrounds as business people, other government agencies, local users of the park, First Nations community members, and many others.

East escarpment area, Riding Mountain National Park

As we move through the various issues, one of the most important to be discussed is communication, and what kinds of communication are helpful and relevant to stakeholders. Inevitably, discussions lead to the challenging constraints that government agencies have to respect. And, in the current reality, that makes for lively discussion about whether social media have a place within government.

In this article by Brian Solis, Government Social Media: Five Questions For 2011, guest writer Dr. Mark Drapeau (Director of US Public Sector Engagement at Microsoft) and the editor of SECTOR: PUBIC, asks five very important questions and outlines their significance and relevance for government staff to effectively use social media to put technology, government, social engagement, citizens, and business together into a larger perspective.

My big take-aways are that he created insights into how governments can build stories for the things that they do so well, and advocate better for these issues and treasure troves of information that they have. For example, if I related this to the national park that I live beside, there are several questions that come to mind:

1. How could diseases in elk, moose ecology, beaver ponds and the significance of them as vascular plant “gene banks”, the conservation of bison, and the habitat of golden-winged warblers become presented as issues using a variety of social media in ways that are relevant to citizens?
2. What kind of constructive narratives could be provided to citizens who care about the park and park issues, and build a greater community and educated constituency in the process?
3. Who better to advocate the information about this than government staff who are working on these issues closely, with care, and with the expertise to share good information with citizens? In fact, the US EPA has set up a Facebook page called Water is Worth It. As a tourism operator, I would immediately link to this content, as a way of helping travellers to become better informed about the area.

The second take-away is that I can also learn from this article is that as a private operator, I can learn how to better use social media and become more “personal” in the way that our brand and story is communicated.

One of the best take-aways from this article is the response/comment from journalist/correspondent digiphile providing examples of how good government narratives in Government 2.0 are being developed in the US, how next-generation technologies are being deployed in partnership with others, and explaining that there is progress being made. A very insightful read.

Parks Canada (the federal agency responsible for Canada’s national and historic parks) has recently invested in some structural changes and staff throughout its organization across Canada to help develop the communication, education, and social media tools to share the amazing stories that are found throughout our parks and sites in ways that create relevance for our parks. There are some helpful suggestions in this article that all of us can learn from.

I was recently (November 2010) invited to speak to the Hotel Managers Association on the island of Cyprus about experiential tourism, at the invitation of both the Hotel Managers Association and the Cyprus International Institute of Management.

This was an opportunity to both contribute a Canadian perspective, but also see first hand how a mass tourism European island nation’s tourism industry is struggling to survive within a global context of change in economics, in consumer demand, and in a world rapidly being affected by climate change.

Aphrodite's birthplace, Cyprus (in the Mediterranean)

The director of the Cyprus International Institute of Management is Dr. Theodore Panayotous. He just had an article posted in the Cyprus Mail on January 28, 2011: Climate change and tourism: A sea change for the industry. There are several comments posted.

As a foreign traveler to Cyprus, and also being an industry operator from Canada, I felt that there were some things that I could contribute to the discussion and responded with my own observations.

Three key areas are outlined in my response that I believe may be important for tourism operators all over the world, from my unique Central Canadian perspective. The following are an abbreviated version of these comments. For a more complete outline of my response, please review the article itself.

1. As a foreign traveler, the Cyprus tourism offer available when searching using Google is a very limited, standardized product mix: resort hotels, events, and packages featuring activities that could be found in Hawai’i, California, or the Caribbean (in other words, undifferentiated). What was missing from the product mix or product offer was the presence and access to “the authentic Cypriots” themselves – real people and access to real culture, cuisine, and nature guided by the wonderful Cypriot people.
2. Climate change is affecting tourism. In particular, a book that was just published (2011) that some may find very helpful in the discussion about climate change and tourism, with over 33 case studies from tourism companies and businesses 17 countries in Europe who have implemented innovative management strategies, involving a combination of carbon savings, costs, and increased profits. The book – Carbon Management in Tourism (Mitigating The Impacts on Climate Change) by Stefan Gossling (ISBN: 978-0-415-56633 pbk) is a very good read.

Several facts early in the reading of this book stand out for me:

• CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) accounted for 56.6% of the contribution to climate change in 2004 (IPCC report 2007).
• Emissions from aviation are contributing somewhere between 2 – 14% of human caused climate change.
• Atmospheric CO2 (the most prevalent of Greenhouse Gases) concentrations have increased to 390 parts per million (ppm), which is at a level 110ppm higher than pre-industrial levels, and at least 40% higher than at any time in the last 800,000 years (Copenhagen diagnosis 2009).
• Tourism’s global contribution to climate change has been updated to a minimum of 5.22% with an upper range of 12.5% (Scott et al 2010).
• Finally, in looking at customer expectations, Gossling identifies, that “…while tourists are not necessarily willing to pay considerably higher prices for holidays that are more climatically friendly or to engage in sustainable holiday practices, there is evidence that pro-climate action by tourism businesses is perceived positively by travellers and seen as a significant add-on (added value). A number of tourism businesses have even built strong brands based on their corporate social responsibility.
• The missed opportunity for Cyprus is that it could become a Mediterranean and global leader in low carbon tourism because of the availability of wind and solar (renewable energy that increases energy security and reduces use of fossil fuel in travel), helping to develop a new concept of a low carbon tourism destination, that supports local people in the process, and helps to revive an economy that is faltering and struggling.

3. The power of the authentic experience: I had an opportunity to experience an evening at a taberna outside Paphos where I listened to live Cypriot music, and ate local food. I shot some video from this experience, which I am happy to share with others. http://vimeo.com/16955719 I left with memories of Cyprus as a wonderful place that I will tell others about. But, it’s only because I was able to shift from my focus from the beaches to the people and countryside of Cyprus – this is where the magic of Cyprus came alive for me.

I loved my experience in Cyprus. I would love to see Cyprus lead the world in showing us how to do low carbon tourism. They are facing challenges that we will all be facing, within a carbon-constrained economy and within global tourism which will be affected one way or another by climate change.

It was great to see a graduate from the Gros Morne Institute for Sustainable Tourism’s Edge of the Wedge excited email today. She proudly let her stakeholders know about the launch of Tourism Dauphin’s new TOURISM website. In the past, tourism has been a sub-category of the City of Dauphin website, and was largely ineffective in the middle of many other aspects of a busy economic development website.

Kudos to Dauphin for seeing the wisdom of developing a tourism-focused website. Carla Wolfenden is an alumnus of the Edge of the Wedge experiential tourism training program.

I noticed several things about the website that I believe reflect Carla and her team’s deeper understanding of tourism as a community economic development driver, the role of good marketing, and the importance of experiential tourism, by having a look at the website:

1. The site captured specific icons that make Dauphin unique (The Dauphin Kings Junior A team, which has a very high loyalty base; Dauphin Countryfest; the Fort Dauphin Museum, a fisher with a walleye in his hands, Ukrainian culture, The Riding Mountain UNESCO Biosphere Reserve; the train station, locally made Ukrainian wood-fired breads, and many others)
2. The whole website is image-rich, with pictures of real people doing real things, along with good photographs of historic buildings, festivals, and attractions.
3. Links to Twitter, Blog posts and things to do are present.
4. Under the TO DO button, they have a whole category of EXPERIENCES.  And, they are really cool experiences. I know, because I have experienced every one of them.
5. I love how the whole tourism approach speaks to “partnering” with local, regional, and national partners (biosphere reserves, provincial parks, national parks, private parks, and local partners)
6. They have integrated seasonality, hockey, arts, and their iconic events in really simple ways.

Carla brings a lot of experience from her previous assignments, world travel in other countries, and her more recent involvement with community-based tourism. She is a great example of someone who takes industry training and applies it in ways that have relevance for her community, and for her community’s “ideal guests”. Congrats Carla and company in Dauphin!  Great job.

What happens when a nation has a dream and takes collective action? They get stuff done! In 1999 the Canadian Tourism Commission struck a task-force on Learning and Enrichment Travel. They brought together industry and government to examine “How we could raise the base level of tourism in Canada”. Twelve years later we are doing it – complete with a refreshed brand for the Canadian Tourism Commission based on experiences. The 2010 Vancouver Olympics were testimonial to how far we have come as a nation in portraying the richness, diversity and incredible ways to enjoy Canada!

Joggins Fossil Tour

This week, Tourism Nova Scotia released their new Experiential Tool Kit for operators!  It’s hot off the press and free! Check it out, it has great information and worksheets to help you out!  This comes on the heels of a best practices mission to Manitoba where they witnessed how experiential travel can work — an opportunity that will be afforded to delegates attending Rendezvous Canada this year!

Other recent significant milestones and resources (just to name a few as there are so many now) include:

2010 – Alberta Tourism, Parks and Recreation invested in a customized experiential travel training program in Cypress Hills for their Parks staff and local community members as they look to anchoring experiences into their tourism strategy moving forward. Tucked into the beautiful Cypress Hills Inter-provincial Park, we enjoyed phenomenal training and guest experiences at the Medalta Historic Clay District, the Elkwater Lodge & Resort, and the Historic Reesor Ranch.  Plans to extend this opportunity are under way this year.

2010  Tourism Nova Scotia invested in a best practice mission, hosted by Earth Rhythms, to learn how experiential travel is being brokered with 50 community partners in the rural area around Riding Mountain National Park.

2010-09  Tourism New Brunswick launched their new Inner Journey’s experiential travel brand in April 2009 with a keynote address by Nancy Arsenault on “The Customer is Changing, So Must We” complete with investing in creating ‘experiential market readiness criteria’ for their new Experiences Collection! A year later, they now have 110 new experiences ‘in market’ for visitors in 2010!!
2009  Parks Canada piloted the use of the Explorer Quotient (EQ), a consumer friendly tool developed by the Canadian Tourism Commission in eight sights across Canada. Gros Morne National Park was one of the sites, and now they have a menu of a range of visitor experiences that appeal to nine different types of travellers interests!

2008-09  The Canadian Tourism Commission launched their Experiences Tool Kit for industry, a Photo guide and a number of excellent tools. They can be obtained for free, in French and English through a formal online-request. It takes a little digging around the site and separate requests to get each document, but it is worth the time.

2008  Experience PEI was launched to “create unique, personal experiences designed to provide lifelong memories” and they are doing a smash-up job, complete with community collaboration and working as a collective to “collaborate to compete”.

Zach Saccary, Retired School Teacher and Local Area Story Teller in Norris Point, NL

2007  Tales, Trails and Tunes Festival was launched in the picturesque community of Norris Point Newfoundland. A community collaboration and celebration of the wonderful musical talent of the region blended with daytime walks in spectacular Gros Morne National Park, afternoon workshops with artists and photographers, and evening entertainment by very talented local musicians and storytellers performed in churches, halls, theatres and pubs throughout Norris Point.

2005 – The Gros Morne Institute for Sustainable Tourism was created (GMIST) and the signature course “Edge of the Wedge” that delivers leading edge experiential travel training to Atlantic Canada. Twenty courses, 500+ people later, there are excellent examples of business applying the principles and making a difference!

… since the beginning of this evolution, the Halifax Citadel National Historic Site in partnership with the Halifax Citadel Regimental Association have been developing, offering and expanding the range of experiential travel programs for a wide range of FIT (fully independent travelers) to CMIT (corporate, meeting and incentive travel) groups to the site. They work in multiple sectors and optimize the assets and attributes of the historic site in admirable ways that protect and ‘present’ the site in engaging, meaningful ways, customized to different traveler interests/market segments.

I could go on and back track a decade … but this is just a sample of what is happening in Canada on the experiential tourism product and market development front and there is more to come!

Are you overlooking a niche market opportunity in your community? 

Niche market opportunities respond to, or create, the invitation for consumers to connect with your product, program or service. The narrower you can define your offer, the better you understand the customer, the greater is your potential to succeed in a tightly defined sub-set of a mass market.

I like to think of it as a filter. Start with tourism for example – people travelling for a range of reasons be it leisure, business, or sporting events.  That brings us to sports tourism – people who travel with a primary motive to participate or watch a sporting event. Narrow this down a bit more and you find running tourism – people choosing destinations based on a primary or secondary motivator to enjoy running experiences. Then examine the running market who is travelling and voila you find - marathon tourism - globetrotters who travel the world to enjoy marathons as a participant or supporter.  In fact a friend of mine ran her first marathon in Iceland, not her home country of Canada.  She combined her desire for an incredible fitness achievement with an incredible vacation destination.

Some people will be avid marathoners who select destinations for competitive purposes and to round out their ‘trophy destinations’ such as the Boston Marathon. Others love running marathons and use this as a reason to visit a new destination. What ever the motivation for the individual, there is a business opportunity for communities to consider.

Today in the Victoria Times Colonist  a wonderful article describes how the 30-year-old Royal Victoria Marathon has grown from a single race event with 750 people, to one that on October 11th, 2009 will attract 11,000 participants into one of four events (full marathon, half marathon, 8 km, and a children’s 1.2 km).  What an experience as a runner and a traveller to Victoria. This could be your community!  Your event!

Think about the business opportunity. This event now attracts 80% of its competitors from out of town. The local economic impact forecast is up to $6 million. Now that’s success!

So what does this mean to your tourism business? your community?

1.  Think about what types of major event or community festival complements your town, your assets. Victoria is renown for its number of per capita runners, training world-class triathletes like Simon Whitfield.

2.  Think about what your company, your community, and potentially hundreds of volunteers would be proud to be associated with, activities your local politicians would support, and affiliate organizations with whom you could partner.

3.  Think long-term and big picture. I doubt the 1979 organizers would have imagined the impact of this niche market idea 30 years ago.

4.  Think about what is needed as a catalyst for the organization, traditional and non-traditional partners, committees, governance structures, funding sources and even things like weather and time of year. Major events can be used to create new revenues, extend the season, rather than compete with existing activities and tourism draws.

5.  Think carefully about the risks and limitations, optimal size (upper and lower limits), have an exit strategy.

6.  Plan the size, shape and financial peramaters for your event in today’s economy, but ensure keep your eye on the future and ‘what if’ your event becomes as successful as the Royal Victoria Marathon?

7.  Be strategic. Major events, even highly niched ones can bring a tremendous amount of opportunity and profile to a community, they also are a great deal of work and require passionate commitment by a large number of people.

If you do champion a major event in your community, remember the most important element – carefully define your ‘ideal guests’ and then focus, focus, focus.

The Canadian Human Rights Museum is taking a really great step forward with its advertising today for a new Director, Learning and Programming.  From my perspective, this is a very good strategic direction.   In my experience across this country, we are still living on the coat-tails of a “build it and they will come” mentality that has not lost its shine for rural municipalities who go after infrastructure money as the be-all and end-all for tourism investment.

The fallacy of this kind of business decision-making at the community level is that the community gets federal and/or provincial grant money, combined with local fund-raising. Local residents are fueled by high hopes for a signature facility within their community.  What they have not recognized is that infrastructure investment has to be paralleled by “programming investment”.  Programming is why audiences or visitors come, not facilities – unless the facility has a very specific and significant architectural motif (with international stature or cultural significance), and even then the lure for seeing the building may only last for a little while.  People want to “experience” music, arts, culture, tradition, speakers, celebrations, recognitions, and many other things.  They wish to take part, to learn, to interact.  This is “programming”.  Programming is what generates revenue over the long-term. And, programming that is experiential generates higher yields, and attracts additional markets.

This community tourism business strategy which emphasizes programming takes sustained effort over time, and different investments and often different community champions to develop experiences, programs, and market these programs to the right visitors.  Often, the people who have worked so hard to bring capital investments in the form of a new facility are not the right people to drive the development of revenue-generating programming.  To drive programming development requires a skill set of community members including an understanding of tourism, product development, programming, web marketing, niche marketing, quality assurance, and entrepreneurship in which new pricing and revenue models can be developed.  These people are also strong collaborators and know how to leverage new resources.

Community recreation facilities, museums, and many other community tourism organizations would do well to hire local directors of learning and programming (another name might be community development and programming officers).  The Canadian Museum of Human Rights is on the right track!

In a recent article in Time Magazine, Caitlin Thompson does a short piece on how Andrew Zimmerman “Eats His Way Around The World”. It’s a great read about “experiential eating”.  We have been including the creation of innovative cuisine experiences as a key teaching piece within our workshops at GMIST’s popular Edge of the Wedge program, as well as on Best Practice Missions, and in various Tourism Café experiential tourism workshops that we have been crafting and delivering all over Canada.

I like Andrew’s quote, “Three or four years ago, I would’ve said we need to get snout-to-tail eating out of high-end restaurants and back out amongst the population at large, where it belongs. I think because of the economic downturn, we have more people turning to those things on their own. What is luckily happening is that in a lot of these smaller countries there are locals who are saying,….We have a really viable product here in culinary tourism, and if we pave over and plow under our indigenous culture, we’re going to be missing out.”

We have many opportunities to dip into our local Canadian inventory or local “menu” of traditions in collecting and preparing local foods that we can share with the world.  What we consider “grandma’s recipe” is extra-ordinary dining for the “come from away” traveler.  Putting these elements together into a seamless, comfortable, and easily delivered culinary experience is an exercise in tourism craftsmanship that takes deliberate and intentional effort.  It is well worth it, as the price becomes higher, the experience more valued, and the “word of fork” well-marketed.

I have long been a proponent of house concerts.  When my wife and I built our home 13 years ago, we had a house concert to help celebrate by means of a “house warming”, the place that we had laboured  to build over a couple of years.  60 people showed up that wonderful day – friends, acquaintances, and those who had helped build the house.  The band – upright bass, guitars, voice, mandolin – was deeply appreciated by everyone.  They had fun.  We had fun.

We recently received a post from friend and songwriter Mark Berube (based out of Montreal) who has a stellar band called Mark Berube and the Patriotic Few.  At one of the morning workshops this year at the Winnipeg Folk Festival, they received a standing ovation!  Mark has been through our place several times.  He brought our attention to this short video piece from CBC TV – The National, about House Concerts across the country

Since that time, we have been having house concerts, at first on an infrequent basis.  Then, more frequently when our daughter and partner Toronto based-bass player Michael-Owen Liston (Check out his unique piece Carry On Crow – beautiful melody), kept introducing their cross-country traveling musical colleagues and professionals to “stop over” in Manitoba at our home, as they traveled east or west doing various gigs.  When they “stopped over”, they would play a house concert.  We were hooked on doing this on a regular basis.

Then, one day, we heard CBC and Mitch Podolak talking on Winnipeg CBC Radio One about introducing a new concept to the prairies – house concerts on a circuit, where songwriters would be able to be guaranteed of a dozen homes or so on a two-week circuit in the fall and winter months.  We called in and shared our perspectives about why we loved House Concerts.  Called Home Routes, artists stay with hosts over-night, being fed and watered.  Our “house concert guests” have brought richness into our homes.  As my wife says…”their spirits are dancing around our home adding to why our home feels so good”.

When I reflect on what makes this part of “The Canadian Experience”, I think that this is part of the quintessential essence of Canada where small, intimate settings are available to re-connect with friends and community (regardless of whether it is rural or urban).  To appreciate our Canadian artists, to appreciate music, to slow down.

I have to tip my hat to Mitch Podolak, founder of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, who seems to make a habit of “founding” new Canadian musical experiences on a continuous basis all across this country.  Mitch founded Home Routes, to which we have belonged, since its inception two years ago.  Six house concerts in eight months.  Stellar artists – Tom Wilson, John Mann, Rose Cousins, Bill Bourne – we love meeting these people, learning from them, and being close to them and their music.

Tom Wilson - member of Blackie & The Rodeo Kings and Lee Harvey Osmond

But, the thing that I enjoy just as much is that our home becomes ” a community” within our community for a night – where music lovers gather to listen and soak in the deeply personal stories, music, and performances.  This is the nature of experience – authentic, first-hand, deeply personal, and we each leave a little bit moved or transformed or enlightened.  If you have time, we invite you to sit back with a coffee or a glass of wine and take in this marvelous 20-minutes of high def video with Stephen Fearing who brought poetry, incredible guitar playing, and a warm-ness of humanity into our home for a couple of days.