The Internet is giving tourists access to more information about

potential vacation stops, intensifying the challenge for the

Okanagan to maintain its standing as a popular destination point.

When Jack Kelly travels he does all the work himself. He plans the trip, investigates prices, reviews airlines, hotels and attractions and makes the bookings all with the click of a computer mouse.

And he does it without leaving the comfort of the chair in his den.

The retired social worker, who moved to the Okanagan Valley from Vancouver Island 14 years ago, likes to travel.

Like so many nowadays, Kelly uses the Internet to plan and arrange his trips, be they flights back to see family on Vancouver Island, holidays in Europe or short-stay getaways for himself and his wife to their favourite spots in Washington, Oregon or California.

Like so many, he wants to hear from others about their experiences, be it with an airline, a hotel, a restaurant or an attraction.

“I find the Internet to be a great source of information and I can deal directly with airlines and hotels,” says Kelly.

“I can check prices, but what I like the best is being able to read reviews that are not advertising.”

Kelly is not alone. The tourism industry is changing with the advent of technology, and especially the growing popularity of social media on the Internet.

And no one locally is more aware of that than the woman in charge of bringing tourists here, Kelowna Tourism chief executive officer Nancy Cameron.

“Our biggest challenge is getting an effective message out, one that will stand out from the clutter,” Cameron says.

But while this area has advantages over others in that its tourism product is so diversified—catering to what are known as niche markets such as eco-tourists, adventure-tourists, golfers, wine lovers, those interested in cultural pursuits and the traditional family beach holidays that the Okanagan is so famous for—competition for the tourist dollar is fierce. 

Where once print advertising was king, now there is a heavy reliance on the web, particularly social media sites.

And that goes for the tourism industry as well as the consumer.

Sites like Twitter and Facebook now allow complete strangers to talk directly with one another about travel experiences—what they liked and what they didn’t like.

Other sites like Trip-

advisor, Google, Yahoo include travel-specific sites, offering user reviews of hotels, airlines and attractions.

According to Cameron, tourists are turning to those sorts of sites to gather information before making decisions about where to go and where to spend their money.

She says it’s clear people like hearing from others about their experience and they value it more highly than the traditional advertisement that used to serve as the lure to bring people to an area.

Unheard of even a few years ago, Kelowna Tourism now has people directly responsible for not only its online presence but for participating in discussions about Kelowna, telling people about the area and what it has to offer.

They encourage others in the community to get involved by relating their stories and talking about what they like to do.

The views of locals are held in high regard in the online world of tourism advertising.

In short, visitors like to hear from locals and like to do what locals do.

To capitalize on that, Kelowna recently held a successful competition where it asked the public to contribute photographs of the best this area has to offer. The top prize was a compact video camera.

The pictures were used to show visitors to the Kelowna Tourism website what this area looks like from a local’s perspective.

But simply telling the world we are here and this is what we look like is not enough. “It’s a moving target and one that requires continual attention,” says Cameron.

Heading into 2010, that attention will take on even more significance given the effect of the global economic downturn in the last year.

While this area saw a drop in tourism of about 10 per cent this summer—lower than the 20 to 25 per cent expected and experienced elsewhere—there is optimism the tourists will return in the spring.

“I think there is a lot of pent up desire to travel out there,” said Cameron, noting many people, even though they could probably afford it, held back last year deciding to have a “staycation” closer to home.

With Kelowna so reliant on what is called “rubber wheel” traffic—travellers from areas like the Lower Mainland who can reach the Okanagan by car—both short-stay getaways and longer vacations are again desirable as the economy returns and more importantly, good news about the economy starts being reported.

An increase in the number of bookings and inquiries are helping to fuel that optimism about a return to better business, and this area plans to capitalize on that. 

•••

To help move tourism along, more than 150 industry representatives are expected to attend the first Thompson-Okanagan Travel Summit here later this week.

Put on by the Thompson-Okanagan Tourism Association, the summit will be a gathering of “stakeholders” in the industry to talk about the future of tourism and what can be done to bolster it after a year of losses.

For new TOTA CEO Glenn Mandziuk, whose responsibilities extend much farther than just the Central Okanagan, putting “heads in beds” is always a challenge but one that this area has advantages in because of the diversity of what it has to offer.

The TOTA region extends from Valemount on the north to Osoyoos in the south and from Christina Lake in the east to Merritt in the west.

As an organization, it recently changed from a membership model to a stakeholder model increasing the number of active participants to 3,200 from 370.

Among its 14-member staff, it has travel trade specialists who work with companies to help market their products, it has media specialists who focus on helping companies with advertising and it has industry development community specialists who work with communities to develop plans to further tourism in their areas.

For Mandziuk, who came to TOTA after many years with Osoyoos Tourism, the biggest challenge in marketing the region is exactly the same challenge Cameron faces on a local level—being heard amongst all the competition.

And the competition extends well beyond the five other tourism regions of the province.

“Competition now is global,” he says, pointing to several countries in Latin America where adventure tourism is a strong competitor to similar types of tourism offered in parts of the southern Interior.

Despite the pressure to compete with other areas, Kelowna is viewed as having a lot going for it from the industry perspective.

It has good infrastructure, such as hotels, amenities, transportation routes into and out of the area and attractions, especially for the niche traveller.

One of the biggest advantages is the airport.

With direct flights to and from Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Toronto, Seattle, and now Mexico sun spots like Puerto Vallarta, Cancun and Los Cabos, as well as Las Vegas, the aim is not only to give locals more choice of where they can go but also to bring people from those areas here.

The direct Horizon Air flights between Seattle and Kelowna were started in a bid to get skiers from Washington State to this area to ski at Big White and over the years larger planes have been added to the route to accommodate travellers with skis as well as golf clubs in the summer.

And a push is on to develop a new, direct route to another U.S. hub airport farther east to avail itself of connecting flights in the U.S.

According to airport general manager Sam Samaddar, a connection to an airport like Denver would not only open up a new level of travel from here, it could also be a pipeline for getting more Americans to Kelowna.

“The Seattle market has been very successful for us,” said Samaddar, adding that pursuing a second U.S. hub is a priority for the airport as it continues planning to move from the 1.39 million passengers who currently pass through the terminal each year to 1.6 million by 2015.

Another goal for the airport is to extend the intercontinental reach of the airport.

With an extended runway that can handle much larger aircraft, flights to and from Europe are possible. However, current federal restrictions on foreign airlines landing at Canadian airports is hampering such a move.

The local airport, like others across the country, want to have what are known as open skies agreements signed, allowing foreign airlines to come here.

Such a move would also help the big beneficiary of winter tourism in this area—the Big White Ski Resort.

According to Michael Ballingall, marketing vice-president of Big White, as long as it is easier and cheaper for Europeans and Australians to fly into U.S. airports such as Denver, they are much more likely to ski at resorts like Aspen than come here.

So up to now, the key market for Big White has been the local market, the Lower Mainland of B.C. and Alberta.

But with a growing resort that focuses on family skiing and provides easily accessible amenities on the hill, Big White has seen its profile as a top Interior ski hill increase steadily over the years. But curiously, not among locals.

Ballingall estimates as much as 70 per cent of locals have never been up to Big White, despite the fact it is only a 45-minute drive out of downtown Kelowna. “It’s a city onto itself up there,” he says. “And it has a tax base bigger than the city of Trail.”

As part of a master plan for the resort, Big White is working on developing its summer business.

Ballingall said building an ice rink on the mountain combined with developing camps could be key to turning the resort into a year-round facility.

“Right now it’s a true ski village,” he said.

With more than 1,000 employees and 17,000 on-mountain beds, the Big White spokesman described the ski hill as a huge economic engine for the Central Okanagan in the winter. And one that would benefit from the addition of direct flights from Europe to Kelowna.

But getting those routes takes a lot of time and effort.

Airlines have to be persuaded that the route makes business sense, there is the traffic to make them profitable and there has to be the planes available to service the routes.

So while work is ongoing trying to make the case, and lobbying efforts are underway with the federal government regarding the open skies agreements, other work at the airport is being pushed to the forefront, such as the infrastructure required to handle the expected increase in passengers.

That work is expected to culminate with the construction of a new international arrivals concourse at the airport in 2014.

•••

While getting tourists here is always a challenge, once they are here, the city has a growing number of places for them to stay.

In recent months, new hotels have been built and plans for more are in the works.

Large additions were made to the Sandman Hotel, which added a tower, Comfort Suites opened a hotel in Kelowna and a new Best Western opened in West Kelowna.

The Fairfield Inn hotel has plans to add more rooms and construction is underway at the Best Western and Holiday Inns in Kelowna.

All the work will add hundreds of rooms to the already nearly 3,000 rooms available here.

According to former Kelowna Hotel and Motel Association president Stan Martindale, the current two per cent hotel room tax, which is used exclusively to market Kelowna as a tourism destination, will be a beneficiary.

Unlike some other places where the money raised from hotel room taxes is used for tourist endeavours not directly linked to marketing, here the approach has been to rely heavily on the local industry to help guide the marketing efforts and use the money solely for that purpose.

It is for that reason that concern has been raised by the provinces musing about changing the hotel room tax structure to provide the money from the planned Harmonized Sales Tax.

It’s a move Kelowna Tourism is opposed to and one Martindale said would be wrong.

He, like Cameron, makes the case that the money raised here is not only a successful user-pay scheme but also one where the money is then used to attract more people to this area, which in turn raises more money for advertising. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, they argue.

The tax, which has been in place for several years, raises $1.3 million annually and accounts for 60 per cent of the revenue raised for Kelowna Tourism.

Because it is a tax, it required government approval and Victoria has said it will guarantee the tax will stay in place until 2011. After that, all could change.

The money raised by the tax is considered critical to the marketing of Kelowna. And it’s that marketing that helps shape the opinions of people looking to come here.

When Cameron talks about connectivity being critical, it’s more than just the physical connectivity of roads and flights into the city.

It’s also the connectivity of people telling others about this area and piquing their interest. And that’s where marketing, in whatever form it takes, comes in.

“When the world is your oyster, there are a lot of choices. We want Kelowna to be top of mind.”

awaters@kelownacapnews.com

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