September 26, 2008
In this issue:

The Federal Election Race Is On!
British Columbia Has a Far Reach!
Challenging Labour Shortages
Canada Specialist Program Deals
Destination 2010 Accommodation Forum
Connect with Media in 2010
Would You Like to Present at the BC Tourism Industry Conference
Looking for a Great Communications/Event Planning Employee?
vcmbc.com Web Report

The Federal Election Race Is On!

The Tourism Industry Association of Canada (TIAC) launched its "Tourism Matters" campaign in national and regional newspapers on September 19th.

See www.tourismmatters.travel for the focus of this campaign, which was developed in consultation with its advocacy partners across Canada. If you are planning to meet with your local candidates and would like to have access to TIAC's toolkit for the election, please visit http://www.tiac.travel/english/welcome.asp.

British Columbia Has a Far Reach!

HelloBC has launched three new integrated websites in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Listings are on all these sites, in addition to North America, UK and Australia. Germany is next (spring 2009). Note: the listings are not translated into the specific languages, but the headers are!

We invite you to take a look!
Korea: http://www.hellobc.co.kr/ko-kr/default.htm?SI=5
Taiwan: http://www.hellobc.tw/zh-TW/default.htm?SI=4
Japan: http://www.hellobc.jp/ja-jp/default.htm?SI=6

Tourism BC’s Asian website project was over a year in the making and is now up and running. All three websites are now using the same technology platform that is used for the HelloBC, UK and Australian websites. This means that the new sites benefit from all the functionality of the original sites that have been put in place over the years. New content has been created, migrated or translated. The translation system is fully automated; when something on HelloBC is added or updated, a notification goes out to our translation partner and (human) translators will add or update the content on the Asian websites. The efficiency of the system allows Tourism BC to publish a large volume of content for the Asian markets.

Challenging Labour Shortages

With the current labour challenges in BC, many employers are beginning to look outside of the Province to fill available positions and bring in skilled workers. Welcome BC, a division of the Province of British Columbia, has developed a useful resource which we believe may be useful to you and your stakeholders. The linked PDF - Employer's Guide - Quick Links to Hiring Foreign Workers provides information and links to key resources which are available to employers looking to hire foreign workers.
www.welcomebc.ca/en/growing_your_community/pdf/foreignworkers.pdf

We encourage you to share this resource with your stakeholders and partners.  It is important that our stakeholders, communities and the tourism industry have the resources available to them to be successful.

For more information and resources please visit www.welcomebc.ca  as well as go2 at  www.go2hr.ca.  

Canada Specialist Program Deals

The Australian Canadian Commission is currently in the process of over-hauling their Canada Specialist program. Part of this is the re-introduction of independent FAM programs for Canada Specialist agents and their partners.

The CTC would like to offer Canada Specialists deals that will encourage their own independent travel to Canada by requesting special rates, value ads, etc. from what you might offer. With agents being able to experience these deals first-hand on their personal trips to Canada, they will return home knowledgeable and inspired to sell your product/service onto their clients.

If you are interested in participating in this program or have any questions please email Kate Brown at brown.kate@ctc-cct.ca.

Thanks again for your support. Here’s to more Aussies visiting British Columbia!

Destination 2010 Accommodation Forum

The website www.2010destinationplanner.com is up and running, and will be promoted as the place for visitors to book their accommodation needs for the 2010 Games. If you weren’t able to make it to one of the Destination 2010 forums that have been occurring around the region, and you would like to get your inventory on to www.2010destinationplanner.com, contact:

Robin Rowley – Tourism Vancouver
rrowley@tourismvancouver.com

Melanie Lippelt – Tourism British Columbia
Melanie.lippelt@tourismbc.com

Ben Day – Whistler
benday@whistler.com

If you would like to view the presentations from the Forum, visit www.tourismvancouver.com/members or www.tourismbc.com/downloads/industry-forum-presentation.ppt

Here are a couple of key points from the Forum to facilitate an exceptional customer service experience by providing a successful accommodation experience for the visitor:

• Experience among hosts of past Winter Olympic Games have shown that competitively priced, multi-week bookings that are secured early in the planning process will lead to higher overall financial returns and fewer vacancies.
• Early commitment of inventory increases the opportunity to secure bookings during the Games time period.
• Those who do not hold out in hopes of securing a highly lucrative rate will avoid the risk of having to lower their rates at the last minute or risks having their property remain empty during the Games.
• A host destination-wide commitment to fair and competitive pricing will serve to position the host destinations very positively in the international marketplace at a time when BC will receive unparalleled exposure; conversely, the host destination runs the risk of receiving significant negative media exposure that could damage the host destinations’ reputation in the long-term if businesses squander the opportunity.

Connect with Media in 2010

Learn how your business and community can connect with the several thousand reporters who will be at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games. Meet Jaime Rupert, the next speaker part of the RBC 2010 Legacies Now Speaker Series. Jaime Rupert, a media strategist for the Salt Lake 2002 Olympic Winter Games and senior counsel for Reputations Corporation, will share how businesses and communities can connect with the media who will be at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

She will discuss what the opportunities are, how to identify a unique story angle for your business or community, how to tell that story in a creative way, who the media are, how to engage them in a memorable way, and the top ten ‘dos’ to get your message out.  She will also share local success stories from each community she will be visiting. Please see the list for the communities and times:

Abbotsford – Monday September 29
In partnership with the Abbotsford Spirit of BC Committee
Email info@abbotsfordspiritofbc.com or call 604.850.7161 x2

Kelowna – Tuesday September 30
In partnership with the Kelowna Spirit of BC Committee
Visit RBC 2010 Legacies Now Speaker Series Kelowna for tickets

Vancouver – Wednesday October 1
In partnership with The Vancouver Board of Trade
Visit www.boardoftrade.com Events & Activities

Live Webcast – Thursday October 2, 12:00 noon. PST
Log on to www.2010LegaciesNow.com
Visit www.2010LegaciesNow.com for more information.

Would You Like to Present at the BC Tourism Industry Conference

The deadline for submissions has been extended to 4:00 pm, October 6th, 2008.

We invite submissions from tourism operators, marketing or sector organizations, or people involved in tourism with expertise in the industry to present at the BC Tourism Industry Conference. Value is placed on topics and concepts associated with this year's theme, "Momentum."

If you have innovative and interesting information to share with our delegates, please submit your presentation proposal.

Please click through to the attached document for all the details and submission criteria.

Call for Presentations

Submissions must be emailed to info@cotabc.com or mailed to:

Council of Tourism Associations
1209, 409 Granville Street
Vancouver, BC
V6C 1T2
Attn: TIC Call for Presentations 

Questions can be directed to Stephen Regan at COTA - info@cotabc.com.

Looking for a Great Communications/Event Planning Employee?

Laura Woodbridge (who you may know as our Media Relations Superstar) has a sister who has recently graduated from university and is looking for employment in the tourism industry. If you are hiring or know of anyone who might be hiring, please feel free to contact Claire Woodbridge at cwood058@uottawa.ca for her resume details.

vcmbc.com Web Report

As we see the leaves start to change colour, we are definitely thinking we have seen the last of our summer weather. So, this feels like a good time to reflect on our summer website activity.

At the beginning of summer, we saw average numbers to our website. Then in early August, VCMBC.com saw a small drop in visitors (only 26,086 visitors). Of course no one ever wants to see a decrease in visitors, but as August is typically when travellers are out in the region, this is statistically reflective of our past data.

Below is a quick look at the top 10 countries visiting our site in the month of August. A new entry we haven’t seen in the past in our top 10 is India!

1. Canada
2. United States
3. United Kingdom
4. Germany
5. Australia
6. Netherlands
7. France
8. Japan
9. Ireland
10. India

A couple of VCM staff members attended a recent Tourism Vancouver Social Media Workshop and discovered some pretty interesting information relating to the world of online marketing. One topic mentioned at the workshop was Google Alerts (which we are proud to say we have been using for a while now).

This useful tool allows for companies to keep an eye on the internet for mention of their product or competitors from other websites, blogs and news sources. With billions of websites in the world, you probably don’t have the man power to be searching the internet one site at a time; Google Alerts will do this for you. You can program the system to send you an email updating you when new posts from other websites have been uploaded. Google Alerts are a great tool in understanding your company’s audience and competitors.