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Vancouver, Coast & Mountains Tourism Region, an agent of Tourism British Columbia, is one of 6 Regional Destination Management Associations in the province. Since 1972 Vancouver, Coast & Mountains has been developing, coordinating and delivering tourism marketing programs on behalf of our stakeholders with the mandate of increasing tourism to the region.

Lessons for Travel Innovators

PhoCus Wright is looking for travel innovators to demonstrate at the 2010 PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit.

Today's turbulent travel market provides the perfect opportunity for innovative companies to launch new technologies and solutions. Start-ups, emerging players and established companies innovate every minute of every day to beat the competition.

Innovators looking to make a splash in travel should heed these words of advice from PhoCusWright's Travel Innovation Summit alumni.

• It is going to take longer than you think
• It will take more money than you think
• It is going to take "all you've got"—be ready to invest your heart and soul
• Do not be afraid to experiment—take risks
• Do not forget to monetize
• And, most importantly, be a demonstrator at The Travel Innovation Summit

Follow this link to watch a video of alumni recommendations.

Each of these travel visionaries demonstrated their innovation live on stage at The PhoCusWright Conference in front of a thousand travel executives—potential clients and investors.

Are you ready to go the distance with your travel innovation? Find out if you qualify to become a 2010 PhoCusWright Travel Innovation Summit demonstrator.

Tourism Industry Awards - Call for Nominations

The 2010 BC Tourism Industry Awards will take place on October 21, 2010 at the Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre. Previously hosted by Tourism BC, the awards are now managed by COTA in collaboration with the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and the Arts.

If you know of a tourism business practicing industry excellence, be sure to nominate them for one of the eight categories:

• Best Tourism Marketing Campaign Award
• Delta Hotels Environmentally Responsible Tourism Award
• Foresight Sustainability Award
• Tourism Media Award
• WorldHost® Customer Service Award
• Technology in Tourism Award
• go2 Employees First Award
• Sport Tourism Award

Companies or organizations may be self-nominated or may be nominated by other agencies. Previous nominees can resubmit as appropriate.

Winners will be selected by a panel of judges and will be honoured at the 11th Annual British Columbia Tourism Industry Awards held during the BC Tourism Industry Conference in Vancouver.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE NOMINATION FORMS

Deadline for Nominations is Friday, August 6, 2010.

Please mail nominations to the COTA offices:

Attn: BC Tourism Industry Awards
1208-409 Granville Street
Vancouver, BC V6C 1T2

Take Advantage of New DMO Accreditation Scholarships

Looking for additional resources to help your DMO on the path towards obtaining accreditation through DMAI's Destination Marketing Accreditation Program? The Destination & Travel Foundation has established a needs-based scholarship fund for DMOs in seeking financial assistance as they work toward accreditation.

"The Destination & Travel Foundation is making it easier for DMOs who want to pursue accreditation by granting DMAP scholarships," says Doug Price, DMAI's senior vice president of professional development. "This is a great opportunity, especially in these challenging times."

Limited to new DMAP applicants, each scholarship is valued at US $1,000 to be applied to a DMO's first year application fee. With no waiting period restriction, interested DMOs can apply for scholarships at any time prior to submitting their DMAP application.

DMAP is an industry-wide program developed by DMAI to establish a consistent standard for destination marketing operations. With 106 DMOs already accredited, this program serves to distinguish those official DMOs committed to industry excellence. To become accredited, a DMO is required to provide evidence of compliance with a number of mandatory and voluntary standards, covering a broad spectrum of topics from governance to finance to brand management.

For more information on available DMAP scholarships, go here, or contact Andi Arabak, DMAI Director of Accreditation.

Throwing mud at a (Facebook) wall
From Rodney Payne, Think Social Media

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard enough about social media that you have thought about creating a Facebook page or Twitter account for your business. Maybe you heard someone talk about some social media success stories at a conference. Maybe you’re competitors are using it. Regardless, before you start flinging mud at a wall, its critical to have a strategy around social media communication.

We are all so busy at work already, why would we want to add one more thing to the list? Especially something that could be time consuming and might not get immediate results. Why do I need a Facebook Fan Page? What will I use it for? How will that actually help my business and who is going to manage all of this? These are all very valid questions.

Individuals can communicate with other individuals anywhere on the planet in real time. There are a huge number of tools that now allow us to communicate using text and this type of communication requires far less investment than verbal communication ever did. Having a conversation requires me to sent and receive many messages and cost money if it required a phone call to do it (until Skype came along). As a result of this change, we are experiencing huge uptake in social media use (SMS messages, tweets, online chats, forums, blogs, messages and emails).

Once you begin to embrace the changes that have impacted our ability to communicate with other people it’s easy to quickly become overwhelmed. If you’re just getting started, it’s very difficult to determine what is most important to your business because there are so many opportunities. You cannot do it all straight away and blindly mimicking your competitors is never a good choice. Social media is not free. As Charlene Li puts it: “Social Media trades media costs for time costs”. You have to make a decision on how to allocate limited resources.

At Think!, we base all of our clients’ strategy around three phases in a Walk – Run – Fly process. It doesn’t matter what you call it but the important thing to remember is not to try and bite off more than you can chew. Paul Cubbon from the University of British Columbia (who also helps Think! with client strategy and workshops) has a great analogy for this: if you’re going to eat an elephant, you have to start with its tail. Ask yourself; what efforts are going to get me the best results and what is the most effective allocation of my budget and time?

It’s harder to be strategic than it is to just rush in because strategy requires planning. Planning takes time and is more taxing than rushing to begin. Articulating plans also requires a lot of commitment. Planning to measure performance requires a commitment to execute. Effectively executing a plan takes even more time. Despite this, strategic planning for social media use is absolutely essential.

A clear strategy will show how your social media use and aligns with other activities to achieve your business objectives. This stops you from wasting time and money on ineffective activities and helps you to allocate resources to real results.

Vancouver, Coast & Mountains staff recently participated in one of Think!’s social media workshops and can’t wait to start “running” with our social media strategy! To get you as fired up as we are about all of the possibilities we thought we’d post links to a few must read articles and must watch videos! The Pixar Animation Studio video is our new favourite promotional video!

Must read articles:

Open Your Eyes and Listen.

Small DMO's, Facebook is more important than your website.

Must see videos:

Pixar Canada - Pixar Animation Studios makes Vancouver their newest home.
Socialnomics – Social Media Revoution - a great video that explains and validates social media

Here are few great “big” articles on the VCM region over the past month.

Westworld Magazine
Lillooet and the Canyon - “Eat my Gold Dust” (page 18-19)
Upper Sunshine Coast – “The Promised Land” (page 23-25 + continues on page 36)

Dreamscapes Magazine
VCM region - “Hooked on BC”(page 28-30)