Vancouver's False Creek viewed from Granville IslandPhoto: Claude-Jean Harel
(Originally published in TOURISM)Domestic tourism activity is coloured with relentless optimism in Canada’s western-most metropolis, according to Tourism Vancouver’s VP of leisure travel and destination management Stephen Pearce. “For the last few years, domestic travel has been very strong, right across the board,” says Pearce. “We tend to look at the following market segments (BC resident travel, Alberta and Ontario), while ‘Other Canada’ gets grouped together. Year over year, we have seen anywhere from 3% to 4% growth from our key Canadian markets since 2005. From 2005 to 2006, overall, Canada was up by 3%; Alberta was up by almost 6 %; and Ontario was up by 4%. Similarly, when I look at the year-to-date numbers, we are still up 3% over last year.”
Pearce sees significant developments in Alberta and Ontario, with consistent growth. “We tend to have a peak period over our summer months, January to September, and that has been pretty consistent will all of our Canadian markets,” he notes. “We have a portfolio of markets that we monitor, so fluctuations in one market will be offset positively by growth in other markets.
“We haven’t spent enough resources researching domestic travel patterns, and we are embarking on some research in metropolitan Toronto to get a clearer understanding of reasons for visitation (perceptions about Vancouver and how these perceptions have shifted over time). We are seeking to identify the characteristics of the traveller that we are seeing today; we did this in Alberta about a year and a half ago, focusing on the key cities of Edmonton and Calgary.”
One of the perceptions to which Pearce will pay particular attention is stereotypes about prices in Vancouver—particularly hotel prices: “We found that sometimes, looking at competitive destinations where we knew we had a price advantage, Albertans still saw us as being the price leader, which often was not the case. We also found there were opportunities for us to package Vancouver in conjunction with other destinations such as Victoria and Whistler.” The Alberta research, Pearce notes, provided Tourism Vancouver with a good base with which to continue to develop messages for the Alberta market.
As far as the Ontario market goes, Pearce says he has observed a spike in visitation in the past few years “that has been driven by a whole host of factors.” He hopes to gain greater insight into the characteristics of those consumers, so Vancouver might be better positioned to meet their needs longer term.
On the US front, Pearce finds the drop in visitation has acted as a bit of a buffer in terms of the domestic market. “So even though our travel deficit has moved to an all-time high, Canadians are still opting to choose vacations in Canada in conjunction with travel abroad.”
Pearce believes the increasing perceptions and challenges with visiting the United States are helping domestic travel. “I don’t know this with great certainty, and it is something we would want to explore. What are the substitutes for a vacation in Vancouver? Are we picking up more VFR, or are we picking up people who are choosing to come to Vancouver for other reasons? We need to better understand these things; what we do know is we are experiencing year-over-year growth, and we are quite pleased with that.”
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