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.

Last week, I was watching the amazing business conference GoingGreenEast on live streaming Ustream.tv video, which if you have not yet viewed, I would highly recommend keeping on top of.  The compression, bandwidth, quality of this live streaming video channel available on DSL Internet is amazing.

I was amazed and inspired by David de Rothschild, who has founded an amazing company called Adventure Ecology.  You are going to get lots of ideas from this site.  But, I really want to direct you to his talk.  Take a cup of coffee, or tea or a glass of wine and sit back for a few minutes….you’ll want to have your notepad or a laptop open with notes page. We need a dose of this kind of inspiration every once in a while, to help us really focus on what’s important.  I was having a conversation with my colleague Nancy Arsenault today, and after I finished, I realized that I needed to share what I have learned from this video with the tourism industry.

You will want to go to this talk – Equation of Curiosity.

What I will not forget are the following words.  Think about them in your own business enterprise and then do what you need to do to…

Every change begins with a question.

Curiosity is a great driver of change.

The equation for curiosity is

D + A/S = I

The equation can be translated loosely as follows:  Dreams are the breeding grounds for adventures (and everyone has dreams).  Those dreams create adventures.  Those adventures create stories.  Those stories inspire more dreams.  If we follow this model, the equation for curiosity becomes more compelling…

“My dream or question was …could we build a boat built entirely out of plastic water bottles (the Plastiki Expedition) ?  To try to showcase a smart way of thinking – that waste is a resource.”  This has exploded into an exciting opportunity to change an entire industry.  - David de Rothschild (Adventure Ecology)

You see, we have a problem today in the world’s oceans.  The ratio of plastic bits (disposed plastic) to phytoplankton (uni-cellular plants) is 6:1 (plastic to phytoplankton).  Waste is fundamentally a design flaw.  Plastic bottles are not smart design.  We need to re-think waste as a “resource stream”.

In experiential tourism, we have the opportunity to share stories, which are what travelers connect to.  (Dreams lead to adventures which lead to stories).  These stories are fulfillment of the dreams of those who created the story in the first place (the experience provider), but offer fulfillment for the traveler as well.

What are you doing to create adventuress, share stories, and most important of all, to create stories that are about being sustainable in your business?  Reducing waste, making the planet a better place, and doing this makes good business sense and good ecological sense.

The first step is the first step:

The first thing that we can all do as an action is to ban plastic bottles from our businesses, how we serve visitors, and from all of our supply chains.  Ban them completely from our businesses, our communities, our grocery stores, our gas stations, our convenience stores.  Yes, this will take leadership.  But, that’s the stage our planet is at.  Tourism can lead the way in doing this.

I see things changing around me. I have just begun to follow (use your RSS Feed button to follow your favorite blogs) a very good online publication called Apesphere.  In their words, “ We launched APEsphere on 20^thJanuary 2009, the inauguration day of a US president elected on the promise of Change.  We chose this day because we are a news organization devoted to bringing about change. The place of business in society needs to change. Profits can no longer come before people or planet.  Of course this isn’t simply a change; it’s a sea-change, requiring the commitment of governments, NGOs, businesses, the media, and individuals.  APEsphere will contribute through original reporting (by pro and citizen journalists), sharing of news reported elsewhere, as well as opinion, expert analysis, and dialogue.  Welcome to APEsphere, and the path to a new capitalism.”  - Andrew Newton, Editor-in-Chief

I am very much enjoying their online news.  MadameApe is a prolific free-lance writer and blogger living in Paris and brings to life some pretty amazing stories about environment, travel experiences, and many other quirky things.  Today, she posted an article called India Homestays: People are at the heart of this.  How true.  

I’m sitting in a train enroute to Vienna from Bregenz, Austria.  It is March 1, 2009.  Across from me is a 20-something female student on her way back to university from spring break. Diagonally opposite me is a 60-something matriarch, serious, thoughtful and independent – quiet and reflective.  And, beside me in the 6-passenger cabin of this particular rail car is a male student reading a report.  Two of us (me included) are plugged into audio devices (I’m listening to a favourite recording of Anoushka Shankar – Rise).  Around me, as I travel eastward on this 650 km, 7-hour journey are the mountains and farms of Austria.

As I started out this day, a couple from Dornbirn (western Austria) joined me in this cabin.  They were going skiing in St. Anton just for the day. Imagine!  They chose to use the train instead of a car.  Each with a backpack on their back, a set of skis and poles, and a bag with their boots, they were simply going skiing for a day.  Much as  a Canadian would go to the country for a day trip, or to the zoo in the city.  Skiing in Austria is the national sport.  So, going skiing for the day in this magical post-monarchy kingdom is just a beautiful and ordinary thing to do.  We reflected about the great Austrian Olympic skier Herman Meier, about ice hockey between Canada the Russians, and about the beauty of our respective countries.  I marvel at the fact that almost everyone I have encountered in a week in Austria speaks English.  I have not had to resort to a dictionary or contorted hand-theatrics to try to communicate.  What a great lesson for me, as a unilingual Canadian.  To be able to speak multiple languages is both admirable and advantageous.  

My point is that we had areas of common interest.  This is good in a world divided by people defending their differences, seemingly driven by leaders who feel their actions justify winning at all costs, and being right.  People suffer; economies collapse; weather patterns change.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in the Yukon dog-sledding with Uncommon Journeys owner Rod Taylor.  He spent an hour with us expressing his vision for sustainability and in his straight-forward manner and explained his involvement with a new iconic eco-lodge project in the Yukon.  Involving investors, First Nations partners and their intention to give life to a a powerful vision to have the most sustainable-greenest eco-lodge in the world  and also become a location where world leaders can share leadership and examples of sustainability.  I am struck by the fact that each of us has the responsibility to lead our tourism businesses to demonstrate the very best of climate-friendly best practices in our operations.  Rod is doing his part in the Yukon.  Are we each doing our part within our own respective communities or provinces?

In Vienna, the cars are small, fuel-efficient, and the tram system is extensive.  Underground tubes, above ground electric trams and rail, it’s all designed to move 1.5 million people efficiently and with low carbon emissions.  

In Canada, although our geography is so large, we need to find much smarter, more fuel-efficient solutions.  Rail has to make a come-back.  We need electric-only cars and trucks.  We need to use alternative energy solutions for rural farms, towns, and residences that emphasize zero to low carbon emissions (wind, solar, geothermal, bio-fuels).

When we travel away from our own country and go away to new places, we see our planet and our country and our living styles through a new lens (a lens of sustainability, inter-connectedness, and environmental accountability).  Imagine – today, there is a world wide tourism trend for visitors to see as quickly as possible iconic tourism locations before they disappear (like the bears on Hudson Bay at Churchill, Manitoba, or the Antarctic before a majority of the ice sheets melt and some of the species associated with cold Antarctic waters disappear, or the Galapagos and the unique island species that are there).  The challenge is once we have seen what we are doing to our planet through a new lens, we need to make some changes.  I look forward to doing my part, as a tourism leader and sustainable tourism business owner.  There are many things that we will be working on at a national, regional, and local level over the next months and years.  We’ll keep you up to date on what some of these are.

If you are interested in a new and revised edition of the Community Indicators Handbook for Sustainability, learn more here.   Gives tourism operators, tourism officials and economic development officers a good starting point for engaging communities in work to make their own communities more sustainable.