From October 17 – 20, 2011 Travel Manitoba hosted its first ever experiential travel training initiative for the tourism industry at Elkhorn Resort and Riding Mountain National Park.

Polkas, Paska and Perogies - how to be an honorary Dauphin Ukrainian!

Staff from Travel Manitoba’s new Visitor Experiences product development team and over 24 members of the tourism industry participated in a GMIST-Travel Manitoba partnered four-day intensive training initiative dubbed “The Cutting Edge”. This is an evolved course, bringing forward content from  The Gros Morne Institute for Sustainable Tourism’s Edge of the Wedge program. However, much new content has been created about relevant experiential travel business application, revenue frameworks, and methodologies for crafting experiences along with costing and pricing them. Travel Manitoba is steering a ship in which they have squarely stepped into a role of assisting the tourism industry to add experiences to the product mix. It’s great to see this focus on experiential travel moving westward across Canada.

New ideas for experiential travel products, new marketing initiatives, and a much larger network of tourism businesses and professionals has emerged from this training.

A second delivery of The Cutting Edge will be taking place in Winnipeg in January. It will be the first time that this kind of experiential travel training will be offered in an urban context.

Albert Einstein once said, “If at first an idea doesn’t seem totally absurd there’s no hope for it.”

Innovators understand that risk is part of the formula for success. You must take risks, often big ones. By moving toward what others in the comfy zone may deem absurd – you can carve out your blue ocean strategy and create a competitive advantage while competitors move in the “obvious” direction.  What are you waiting for?

Nimmo Bay Resort, in northern British Columbia operates with their own theory of Hospitality:  E2=MC   Expectations Exceeded = Memories Created! Appreciating that there are more people ‘out there’ than will visit their property and book a vacation, they are reaching out and connecting virtually with the market place – and yes, with the goal that some will convert to bookings as a result of their online experience.

Want a ride in a helicopter!  Board the plane!

P.S. If you recognize the voices – the song is from the Canadian Tenors as as Clifton Murray (one of the tenors) is their son!  How cool is that.

So as a small business you want to move beyond gut feeling/instinct and learn more about your guests to help inform you product and market development. Great. Your destination marketing organizations (DMOs) have lots of market/sector information nationally (CTC), provincially, and regionally – take a peak at that.  Then set a plan to interview your own customers. Think like a journalist, keep the conversation short and gain insight into the 6 W’s as an easy starter.

Who: interests, attitudes, things they love to do when travelling, who they are travelling with TODAY.

What: kinds of things do they like to do when travelling, do they do ‘your type’ of activity regularly when travelling or is this a one-off?

When: find out time of year, day, week they like to get out and travel (e.g. fall, prefer morning activities and avoid weekends)

Where: do they like to go? Do they return often or always looking for something new

Why: did they pick your business? how did they find out about you?

Why not: what would prohibit a person from enjoying the experience you offer? What could be changed to make it more appealing?

Remember, be consistent with your questions, record the information and most importantly – DO SOMETHING WITH IT. If you are gathering info for the sake of info it is a waste of your time and the visitors. Make in meaningful for all.

Economics may not be your thing but there are two economies as a travel business you need to be thinking about these days.  The Experience Economy (Pine & Gilmore 1999) is an economic model but not a painful one to grasp! It starts with the basics – commodities, goods, services, experiences, and transformation. As your business offer climbs the ladder, the volume gets smaller, the price point higher. People are willing to pay for an experience – that’s the bottom line, and an experience done so well that engages people, captures the hearts and minds and is personally relevant can be transformational.

The Attention Economy I first heard of from Seth Godin and while not a formal framework like the experience economy is none-the-less valuable. The concept is simple – people only have so much time and there is lots of competition for it. Clever marketers will realize that capturing peoples time in advertising is critical and there is a price to pay for permission based marketing vs broadcasting into the wide unknown.  Be focused, know your ideal guest, and zoom in on the target market with the right message, image, and call to action. Don’t waste your time and money and theirs.

It’s the time of year we love the most as guests visit our properties, engage in our experiences and enjoy our region. It’s also a great time to gather a few key insights that can inform product development without any expense beyond a little time. Three questions you and your staff are asking – and tracking – with all your guests:

1.  What was most memorable about your visit?

• Capturing this information can provide information on excellent staff, aspects of the experience that were most important, highlight missing elements you can amend, focus your attention on what is most important to your guest.

2.  What pictures have you taken that capture the peak moments of your visit?

• This information will reinforce or highlight images and activities important to you guests. This helps you affirm what images/videos you should be using in your marketing efforts, and provides links to current visitors enjoying themselves.

3.  Why did you choose to include our company in your vacation activities?

• Simple, trackable data that gets down to rationale.

Together, these simple questions can help you zoom in on your ideal guests and what is important to them.  Remember though, gathering customer information is most powerful if it is systematically gathered (do it regularly for a period of time), the questions are asked consistently (regardless of which staff person/people are involved) and most importantly — YOU REVIEW AND ANALYZE THE DATA AND USE IT TO MAKE DECISIONS!

Go for it and have a great summer of gathering product/experience development insights.

Travel Manitoba just completed their provincial conference on the theme “Sharing Manitoba’s Story: Building the Visitor.” Edge of the Wedge experiential travel graduate Laurenda Madill was a major driver behind the successful event with her colleagues Wayne Copet and Karla Pratt.

I was thrilled to be invited ‘back home’ to give the keynote address on “The Power of Storytelling”.  Travel Manitoba not only had a ‘theme for the conference’ but invested in weaving all the speakers together to harmonize the event and ensure everyone giving a presentation linked their contribution to the provincial objective for the conference. At the end of the day, all speakers returned to the stage for summary  comments, followed by my parting words, Wayne Copet – Director of Industry Development, then Colin Ferguson, CEO of Traval Manitoba.

What was interesting though interesting, was after finishing the day, I had many requests for the presentation I loaded it up to Slide Share. What a surprise it was to me,  shortly thereafter, to receive a notice from Slide Share saying:

“Your presentation The Power of Storytelling is currently being featured on the SlideShare homepage by our editorial team. We thank you for this terrific presentation, that has been chosen from amongst the thousands that are uploaded to SlideShare everyday.”

There were approx 150 at the conference, but so far 700 views on the presentation – so Manitoba’s story will go on!! How cool is that!

Edge of the Wedge 25 – GMIST

http://tourismcafe.ca/tourismcafe26.mp3

Robyn Jeffery from Alma, NB – How do you bring an idea to a community and identify leaders to buy in?

Dianne Heisler from Fisheries Museum of the Atlantic in Lunenberg Nova Scotia: How do you introduce experiential travel in a town with a traditional mindset?

Carmen MacArthur from Celtic Heart, Cape Breton Island: How do you price experiences? with help on the answer from Perry Gotell and Tranquility Cove Adventures.

Peggy MacAskill from Gaelic College of Celtic Arts and Crafts, Cape Breton: Who should actually be selling these packages? a cluster or individuals?

Recorded live at Edge of the Wedge in Rocky Harbour, NL on April 2, 2011.

http://tourismcafe.ca/tourismcafe25.mp3

Eva Gutsche from Ontario’s StemConsulting.com wonders, “Who’s responsibility is training of experience providers?  Where does the funding come from?”

Adam Doiron from Prince Edward Tours asks: How do you price experiences?  Are people really willing to pay?  George Campbell from AnneSociety.org on Prince Edward Island wants to know how you come up with a price for experiences?

Jennifer McKeane from the Nova Scotia asks, “What are the implications of developing experiences in terms of liability, insurance, permits?”

. . . and we wrap with a link to a popular viral Youtube video presented by our Northwest Territories guest – Samantha Stuart.

This past April I had an amazing experience in Ecuador. From the mountains to the Amazon Rainforest, we met indigenous people and enjoyed a simpler way of life. In the Amazon, the primary reason for the local indigenous people to entertain the idea of hosting tourists, is to build alliances with North Americans and Europeans in order to help protect the fragile Amazon ecosystem.

I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Daniel Kooperman about how the Kapawi Ecolodge got its start. Kapawi was recently awarded a distinctive honour of being one of the top 10 Ecolodge projects in the world by the United Nations.
As well, the Alliance with North Americans has helped this community of Achuar people gain political control over their homeland, making it easier to keep oil, forestry and farming exploitation from destroying their world.

I hope you enjoy this conversation with Daniel, as the rain falls on our roof and we await the all clear so that our pilot can take us deep into the Achuar Amazon territory and Kapawi Ecolodge.