Ontario Culture Days’ Departure Lounge  |  Episode 2: Managing Tourism

Transcript

[Shawn Newman]

Hello! Welcome to the Ontario Culture Days’ Departure Lounge, an audio course podcast designed to teach you about the ins and outs, and the trends and pitfalls of cultural tourism in Ontario. I am your host, Shawn Newman speaking to you from Tkaronto.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt devastating blows to the arts and culture sectors, as well as tourism. And now, two years in, we are seeing leaders from both industries coming together in new and innovative ways as they work toward recovery and rebuilding. This audio course, produced by Ontario Culture Days, is one way that we hope to support collaboration between these sectors, and to close the gaps between them.

You might think that gaps between the tourism and the arts and culture sectors seems odd, and we agree! But there are fundamental differences in how these sectors work, even though they have so much in common. Throughout this series, we’ll explore the ideas at the core of cultural tourism, connect these concepts to the arts, and hear from professionals on the ground.

This audio course podcast is geared towards arts and culture sector workers and organizations. But we certainly invite everyone to listen and learn with us! This podcast, its transcripts, and the resources referenced throughout are all available on the Ontario Culture Days website. Whether you are new to thinking about or working with Ontario’s tourism sector, or feel like you want an inspirational refresher, Ontario Cultures Days’ Departure Lounge has something for you.

In this episode, we’re going to talk about managing tourism by way of introducing you to some of Ontario’s tourism structures. In the first half, we’ll define some terms so that we’re all on the same page about what tourism is and who tourists are. We’ll also talk about the structure of the tourism sector in Ontario and tell you about the kinds of tourism service organizations that are out there. In the second half of the episode, you’ll hear us talking with tourism professionals that are doing exciting work on-the-ground. We hope that in hearing directly from them, you’ll not only be inspired to engage with the tourism sector, but also see how the ideas that we’re introducing you to can extend into your own work.

In addition to this podcast, we’ve compiled resources and stories about cultural tourism and the innovative ways that people and organizations are working collaboratively across sectors, across communities, and even across the globe. This podcast and the resources that we discuss are all available on the Ontario Culture Days website.

Let’s dive in!

First, what exactly is tourism? Well, it depends on who you ask. But typically, tourism is understood as the economic activity related to travelling, no matter the purpose for travelling. It can be for pleasure or business. Even activities as mundane as visiting friends or relatives are considered forms of tourism. And the tourism sector as a whole comprises all the activities and organizations that provide goods and services that facilitate tourist travel. These economic activities help to create demand by attracting tourists and catering to all travellers’ needs.

Second, who is a tourist? From a tourism industry perspective, a tourist is typically defined as a person who, unlike locals or most commuters, travels away from home for at least an overnight trip be it for business, leisure, or other personal reasons such as visiting friends and relatives. Even people who travel back to the place they grew up, but no longer live, are considered tourists. This is called VFR—visiting friends and relatives travel. So, whenever you leave your home and go to a different place for an overnight stay, you’re a tourist!

You might also encounter language that refers to the tourism sector as the “visitor economy.” This perspective takes a broader definition of “tourism” and considers the larger economic impact of all visitors, including local ones like day-trippers who don’t stay overnight in their destination. So, in this series we use “tourist” and “visitor” interchangeably. In a later episode, we break down the types of cultural visitors, some of whom travel specifically for a given cultural offering while others simply happen to be around and choose to partake in the experience. Understanding these different types of tourists, and what drives them, is obviously very important from a marketing standpoint. But for now, we’re talking big-picture tourism.

Third on our list: how does tourism, as a sector, operate? Specifically, who are the key actors and organizations that people working in arts and culture are likely to interact with? I’ve got to admit here that navigating through all these acronyms can be quite daunting. On the Ontario Culture Days website, we’ve provided a glossary to these terms. You might pause for a moment to download that resource and follow along with it as we go. All of this is going to set the stage for the deeper discussions throughout the rest of this series.

The most common type of organization in the tourism sector is the DMO, or Destination Marketing Organization. Typically, DMOs promote the destination in order to attract travellers at the national, provincial, territorial, regional, or local level. For example, Destination Canada, Destination Ontario, and Destination Toronto are all DMOs. And in Ontario, the provincial ministry identifies 13 Regional Tourism Organizations, or RTOs. But we can consider these 13 RTOs as DMOs.

Already it’s a bit complicated, but in the long-run these acronyms will be helpful!

Some DMOs are also involved beyond marketing by contributing to the planning and managing of tourist products offered by the destination. In this capacity, DMOs contribute to developing strategies to make destinations more competitive and sustainable, including concerns for social equity and economic development, as well as for environmental issues. In this way, we may also refer to them as Destination Management Organizations. So, while there are two distinct kinds of DMOs—marketing and management—their activities might be intertwined. This means that for the arts and culture sector, it’s important to know if DMOs in your region are focused on marketing, management, or both.

So, we have DMOs that can be at various levels of community, and we have RTOs in Ontario that are also DMOs. And while the DMO acronym is the most widely used, at the local level you might also encounter CVBs, or Convention and Visitors Bureaus, which are DMOs at the municipal level.

Other important groups in tourism are the professional associations such as the Tourism Industry Association of Canada, or TIAC, the Tourism Industry Association of Ontario, or TIAO, as well as sector associations such as Festivals & Events Ontario or Attractions Ontario. There are also many private groups in tourism, such as tour operators or destination management companies that can help you bring visitors to your community and to places of interest, also known as attractions, to showcase your community’s natural, cultural, or entertainment value.

So, while the arts and culture sector might not think of everything it does as attractions, reframing your thinking about your activities and programming as such will help you to see your organization as part of the tourism ecology. And being able to speak tourism language will help open doors to resources, partners, and collaborations that will benefit you and your organization.

Taken together, these three elements—what tourism is, who a tourist is, and how tourism operates—paint a high-level picture of the sector. There are of course a lot of local nuances and specificities to consider. But generally speaking, when we speak of tourism, we refer to the sum of all the products and services that are proposed to tourists and consumed by tourists, and that support their tourism activity both directly and indirectly. Some of the more obvious components to tourism as an activity, and to tourism as a sector, are: travel communication and booking; transportation; accommodations; and food and beverage. But also—and importantly for us—natural, cultural, and arts attractions, destination visits, shopping, events, and more. These are all part of the tourism sector.

We can see that this sector is a dynamic and competitive industry! Before the pandemic, tourism made up over 10% of global GDP and employment and 6% of Canada’s GDP. In Ontario, the tourism, culture, and heritage sector generated $43.7 billion in economic activity, or 4.9% of Ontario’s GDP in 2019 alone. Clearly, tourism is a main driver of our provincial economy. And as a sector, it requires the ability to always adapt to changing visitor needs and desires. In addition, attracting visitors from outside Canada requires understanding international trends and specificities. Today, more than ever, the key to success in attracting and satisfying visitors is to propose unique and different enjoyable experiences in a safe environment.

However, despite its economic significance, the tourism industry is not always taken seriously. Some even think of tourism as a frivolous sector—and that’s a sentiment that the arts and culture sector fully understands! As a result, national and provincial strategies can lack consistency. Some aspects of the sector may even be lacking support or direction, and objectives may simply be to increase the number of travellers instead of focusing on the quality of experience. For the World Economic Forum, Brian Mullis notes that the tourism sector and governments should understand that “the narrow focus on increasing numbers is a problem and creates issues and negative effects that diminish the quality (and value) of the experience for travellers and visitors alike.” This is why we introduced regenerative tourism in the first episode. Understanding how tourism itself is changing, and the similarities in values that we share with the tourism sector, positions us all to make stronger, more beneficial contributions to the communities in which we live, work, and play.

Mullis’s quote reminds us of the ways that the arts and culture sector also struggles with purely quantitative measurement. Our own reporting structures to governments and funders are so heavily focused on statistics about numbers of ticket sales or attendees instead of on the experiences that our attractions provide. So here we find yet another point of connection around which we might work with tourism—how can we leverage our shared knowledge and struggles around demonstrating our impact beyond statistics and build collaborative strategies that tell better stories?

Of course, to work in a collaborative approach with tourism, it’s essential to get to know the other professional and institutional organizations operating in your region.

[Segue music]

For a quick recap of where we’re at, in part one of this episode on managing tourism, we defined some terms pertaining to what tourism is and who tourists are. We also talked about the structure of the tourism sector in Ontario and told you about the kinds of tourism service organizations that are out there. On our website are transcripts of both parts of this episode and some additional resources to go along with this audio course.

In this half of episode two, we’re going to introduce you to six cultural tourism professionals and experts living and working here in Ontario. These people will join us throughout this series to share their expertise and experiences working in cultural tourism. On our website you’ll find more information about them and their organizations. I spoke with each of these incredible people one-on-one over Zoom, and over the rest of the series you’ll hear a kind of mash-up of my conversations with them organized around each episode’s theme.

No matter what region they are in or what kind of organization they work at, one of the things I wanted to know was how they go about understanding who attends their attractions. Tova Arbus is the Artistic Producer at Fringe North in Bawaating, also known as Sault Ste. Marie, which is on Anishinaabek territory and also within the Métis Nation. She talked about some of the struggles for very small organizations in collecting information about their visitors. However, she and her team have come up with some personal and creative ways to do this and that centre some important components of regenerative tourism.

[Tova Arbus]

In the past, we’ve engaged typical tools, right – surveys, asking people at the door to identify where they are coming from, offering opportunities for feedback and then trying to track that data. I find that that’s a really simplified way to do it and it doesn’t always give you the deeper understanding of why did someone come there and how does it move them to engage with something like this – which personally I feel you need to know if you’re going to encourage that they come back again.

It’s all fine and good that someone stops by once and says, “oh yeah, here’s my postal code” but it’s a whole other thing to say, “I came here with intention and here’s what it is, this is what I would come back for.” You know, like I mentioned, we have a whole series of surveys and feedback forms that we give to folks. But it leaves a little to be desired.

So, I’m trying to bring things into a more relational-focused opportunity, so that we are consistently hosting artist talks and gathering points to welcome audiences, so that they can talk about their experiences as well.

And then we would have identified folks within our team who that’s their job – to go out, chat with audience members, ask them a few key questions about where they came from and what they are doing here. Then try to get into that conversation about why would you come back, what would you like to see, or what hooked you this time that you would be excited about coming and engaging in again. So, we are going to try it that way and do a bit more person-to-person engagement this year.

We also in the past have really relied on our local tourism hubs and the city to support us in tracking kind of more general numbers: watching the growth that happens as tourists come through Sault Sainte-Marie; identifying was this a stopover for you on your way west or east, or were you staying here with intention; and was this an urban visit, did you take part in the arts and culture opportunities that are here or were you spending time in nature – which are usually the two reasons people come up to Sault Sainte-Marie.

[Shawn]

You can hear how conventional metrics like surveys and other data collecting tools are insufficient as Fringe North wants a more nuanced profile of who their visitors are. But one of the ways that Tova and Fringe North go about collecting data on visitors is by working with the city. We also heard here the importance of relationships with their visitors. As we know, centring relationships is a key feature of regenerative tourism.

In speaking about visitors to the Woodland Cultural Centre, Executive Director Janis Monture described who their visitors are and the impact they have on the community. She also described some of the ways their relationships with the local community provides an opportunity to refer visitors to other areas within the region. The Woodland Cultural Centre is on the Six Nations of the Grand River territory, which is also within the City of Brantford in Southern Ontario.

[Janis Monture]

I think in a typical year, pre-COVID, the majority of our visitors are coming within probably an hour drive radius – people from the GTA, people from Hamilton, Niagara, London, Kitchener, Waterloo, Kitchener-Waterloo area, or the friends and family demographic. So, I would say that is still a large part of our clientele, it probably makes up about 70% of our visitorship. When friends, family, and relatives come and visit, they’re bringing them to our site to look at, learn about Indigenous culture and history specific to this region.

And then we do see international visitors as well, primarily in the summer months. A lot of them come for the day, we see them come to our site for a couple hours and they’re going onto a number of other, whether it’s historical or arts and cultural sites within the City of Brantford. They’re staying overnight typically or they’re going into restaurants and local stores. So, there are definitely more day trippers who come to visit us.

For some international visitors, they’re coming very specifically, they came to the region, for example, to go to Niagara. Then [we are] one of their stops all the way back to the airport kind of thing, so we tend to see that as well.

You know, typically when they do come, you know, they’re not just necessarily coming to just go through our museum and galleries. They’ll stop in our gift shop, or they’ll also request, “where can I get this in the community.” They’re looking for an Indigenous item that’s handcrafted or handmade, and that’s what we typically like to promote.

[Shawn]

Janis mentioned visiting friends and family tourism, or what we called in the first half of this episode, visiting friends and relatives. Regardless, there are key tourist group particularly during and emerging from the pandemic.

On a different scale, the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake has a very large and international reputation with a very dedicated visitor base. The Festival is on the traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee, the Mississauga, and the Neutral Nation. I spoke with Tim Jennings, Executive Director of The Shaw Festival, about their organizational capacity to track where their visitors come from. Like Janis at the Woodland Cultural Centre, Shaw has a great sense of other activities their visitors engage in besides attending Shaw programming.

[Tim Jennings]

We are very good at relationship management. We know exactly how many people came to our shows, we know where they’re from, we know quite a bit about them. We ask questions, we send surveys out there before and after each of the shows to get more information and we keep track of that information.

In a normal year like 2019, we saw that about 325,000 people came to the Festival. Most of our attendees – because we’re a festival – see multiple performances in the course of a week. In high season, we have something like 12 separate productions all running in a week. Frankly, you could go see three or four productions a day, if you really worked out the timing of it. So, we have that advantage: Canadians buy about six tickets per household, Americans buy about 10 tickets per household, and they stay a long time.

Most people coming down here for longer stays anchor their stay in Niagara around going to the Shaw Festival. They use this as a hub-and-spoke framework. They go out for a series of day trips to go do other activities. Because Niagara is literally the number one tourism destination in the country, there’s a lot to do around here. They’ll go out to wineries, they’ll go out to restaurants, they’ll go out to agritourism, like peach picking, they’ll go to the parks, there’s so many historic parks in the area.

But they also go to places like Toronto. They’ll take a bus into Toronto or they’ll drive up to Stratford to see shows there. In fact, Stratford and we talk about this, a lot of the folks who go to see their shows stay in Niagara and see our show and see [Stratford’s] shows. There’s quite a crossover. Then they’ll go up to the Kitchener-Waterloo to the farmers’ market or they’ll try things. They’re cultural omnivores – they go to different activities and try different things.

[Shawn]

Cultural omnivores—this is a great way to describe cultural tourists and offers us a way to reframe how arts and culture organizations fit into the tourism ecology. As you heard Tim say, Shaw visitors aren’t there just for theatre.

We’ll hear more about the variety of tourism activities and products that intersect with arts and culture a bit later. Let’s go back to Tim as he talks about Shaw as a business.

[Tim] 

When I taught arts management, one of the things that I say a lot is that the largest not-for-profit or charitable theatres in North America are small businesses. Stratford at 1000 people is almost a medium-sized business. The Shaw Festival is a small business. We have a $34 million a year budget with 550 plus people working for us. We’re one of Niagara’s 20 largest employers, but that still makes us a small business.

I know that’s a hard thing for people to get their heads around. There are people running banks with 50,000 employees under them, not the whole bank, just under their department. We don’t exist in that world. Our budget is still the pen-and-paper budget of TD Canada Trust.

But for the arts, we’re a large organization – or at least for the charitable art [sector].  It’s an interesting space to be in. I talk a lot about the commercial theatre industry and we don’t look anything alike. We look alike from the point of view of an audience member watching a show. But from a structural point of view – like The Lion King’s $10 billion of business over 20 years – the rest of the not-for-profit theater sector makes about one tenth of that a year. It’s not the same world.

[Shawn]

Tim makes a great point about the structural differences between not-for-profit and for-profit and how to an audience member, those differences don’t matter. What this means from a tourism perspective is that the same tourist that goes to big-budget musicals like the Lion King, as Tim mentioned, also go to not-for-profit or even charitable attractions like the Shaw Festival.

Another perspective on the business end of arts and culture within the tourism ecology comes from Meredith Armstrong. She’s the Director of Economic Development at the City of Sudbury. Sudbury is in Robertson-Huron treaty territory and is the traditional lands of the Atikameksheng Anishnaabeg and the Wanabate First Nations, and it’s also part of the Métis Nation.

Meredith spoke directly to the importance of cultural tourism and she highlights how the sector has a wide breadth of types of business models and some of the ways they fit together.

[Meredith Armstrong]

Whether we’re talking about a single artisan who creates an experience by showing people how a product is made and engages with an audience on different levels – whether it’s digital or in person with studio tours – all the way to something like a symphony or an art gallery, where there’s an experience that may drive tourism, or maybe a nice add-on to extend a stay. So, it’s a lot more fluid and it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. We can foster that and promote it as something very unique to our community, but it also depends on so many factors to make it more consistent.

We’re lucky to have resilient organizations and the brick-and-mortar partners who can provide that cultural experience. Then we can add on those interesting, innovative, start-up entrepreneurs and organizations that are sometimes more vulnerable because they do depend on public dollars.

[Shawn]

Kate Monk is the Senior Director of Regenerative Tourism Development & Communications at Explorer’s Edge, or Regional Tourism Organization 12. Her organization is branding their region as the Great Canadian Wilderness Just North of Toronto. The area is the traditional lands and waterways of the Anishinabek, the Algonquin, the Mohawk, and the Métis peoples, and is part of the Robinson-Huron and Williams Treaty territories.

Kate spoke to some realities for arts and culture organizations that I’m sure many of you can relate to. But she also makes a great case for thinking more broadly about impact and gives some interesting examples.

[Kate Monk]

For them, to be able to measure and have the resources, if there’s one person working in an arts organization with 20 board members, they can’t do everything! There is so much benefit in them being able to measure the economic impact that is not directly related to somebody interested in choral music or dance.

How many artists do they book into hotels? How many meals do those artists go out and have while they’re here? How many people come? Where do they come from? What is the distance they travel? What does the potential spend in the region? And being able to quantify that, you’re getting into this sort of commerce-mode.

[Shawn]

Kate also spoke about some shifts in business models within tourism that really point to the potential for arts and culture to be more intentionally included by tourism. It also demonstrates how the arts and culture sector already has a wealth of products that we can offer.

[Kate]

Our tourism industry was built on the resort industry. But the resort industry has taken a bit of a hit because of short-term rentals and unregulated cottage rentals – which I’m not making a judgement on, I’m just indicating.

So, we’ve seen sort of these independently-run, family-owned resorts, many of which are still going strong but not near as many as used to be probably. If they’re just looked at as accommodation, they got to make sure they’ve got all the bells and whistles. But, if we look at them as built heritage, because then the stories get to be really, really incredible.

I would love to see the providers here of accommodations or experiences connecting with arts to use supply chains. For instance, to have local artisans’ craft wear or quilts in resort rooms. Or have the art of the artists – which a lot of craft breweries do this up here too – on the walls, all exuding place. And that’s where the culinary arts obviously become very obvious, because of what are the local plants that can go onto the dishes – in our case, blueberries. That type of thing really builds destination more than anything.

[Shawn] 

Stepping back a little bit for some national perspective, Beth Potter is the President & CEO of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada, or TIAC. She lives and works from Ottawa, which is built on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory. What she’s seen underscores the value that arts and culture bring to tourism at a local level, and how what we do is deeply valued by tourists.

[Beth Potter]

One of the things that I’ll say, another kind of shining light or legacy pieces that came out of this pandemic is I have never seen our industry, including arts and culture, work so well together. The collaboration has just been amazing.

With certainly a focus on domestic and support local, now more than ever we are seeing Canadians really value local creators and local producers more than they ever have. I’m also seeing Canadians value Canada as a travel destination more than they ever have. We’ve heard this time and time again through this pandemic, where people weren’t able to travel because of border restrictions. They’re exploring different parts of their country that weren’t even on their bucket list and that and they’re blown away.

I think that that is one of the shining stars of the last two years – this locals-first approach and the supporting of each other. I don’t know how many interviews I’ve done, where I’ve said, “get out, support local, because local is your neighbor.” And it really is, that’s the truth of the matter.

[Shawn]

What I also hear from Beth in this piece of my conversation with her is the importance of local relationships. With the pandemic completely disrupting both the tourism and arts and culture sectors, we’ve had to look much more closely to our local community connections. Building local relationships across sectoral divides is a central tenet of how to manage tourism.

In later episodes you’ll hear about some ways to connect with tourism, and some ideas on what kinds of resources might be available in your region.

To end this episode. I’m bringing Tova Arbus from Fringe North back into the conversation, as she spoke very genuinely about something that so many of us are feeling that so much of this is new terrain.

[Tova]

I’m really curious and interested in this period of discovery for all of us, as we figure out ways to, to reopen and renew post-COVID as we figure out ways to reconnect with our communities, with each other as collaborators, and to discover new aspects of what we’re creating, as especially as far as how they relate to each other.

[Shawn]

And again, we hear how important relationships are and will be.

Well, we’ve reached the end of the episode on managing tourism. We hope that the ideas from part one, along with the resources on the Ontario Culture Days website, have given you some concrete tools to begin thinking about how to work with tourism in your community or region. We also hope that through the conversations we had with folks on the ground in part two that you can see some connections that you can extend into your own work and organization.

In the next episode, we’ll explore how to market tourism. You’ll hear about destination marketing, defining selling points to attract visitors, measuring marketing success, and some governmental supports for arts and culture organizations. And, again, we’ll talk with some of the same folks in the real world doing amazing things.

We’d love to hear about anything that you and your organization are building, especially when it comes to working with the tourism sector. To tell us about your work, or to hear more about ours, visit our website at oncd.backup.sandboxsoftware.ca or email us at info@onculturedays.ca.

I’m Shawn Newman, host of the Ontario Culture Days’ Departure Lounge. This podcast was made possible thanks to support from the Province of Ontario and the Canada Council for the Arts. Thank you, also, to our six experts featured in part two, and thanks to you for listening.