Greenwood's city administration is in the final stages of developing a tourism strategy, with every resident playing a critical part in the top economic driver for the region.
A town hall meeting at the McArthur Centre on May 21 was aimed at giving city staff critical input to create a guiding document on the tourism strategy that will inform everything from securing funding and providing budgeting recommendations to council, to strategically providing resources as an investment into our tourism sector.
It focused on the tourism strategy in two parts. The first was to show the progress of a collaboration with the Thompson Okanagan Tourism Association (TOTA) and Boundary Country BC. It included a statistics report on Greenwood-specific numbers on annual tourist traffic in the area.
Amy Kneller, Operations Manager in the Symphony Tourism Services department at TOTA – the for-profit side of the association – gave an overview of the statistics the association gathered.
She explained this is a “low-level” snapshot survey of visitors and their reasons for coming. However, the numbers were telling. Visitors were broken down into either tourists – those staying in the city overnight, or “excursionists” – those coming from elsewhere and spending a few hours before leaving.
Many of those are also frequent returning visitors taking in offerings that happen every year, she said. The average number is three trips per person annually.
For the tourists, around 69 per cent were staying about 1.7 nights, which Kneller said is a critical piece of information for the city to focus on to find out why people are staying to plan events.
For excursionists, most stayed for about six hours, around 45 per cent stay for four hours or less, and around 16 per cent stayed for around 12 hours.
“What this is telling me is people are drawn in for a good chunk of time, whether it’s to go to the museum, hiking some trails, having a meal or snack or going on a ghost tour,” she said.
Where people are coming from is also telling. Using a “heat map” to show the highest concentrations of tourist origins, the highest is from the neighbouring Okanagan, Lower Mainland, Northern Washington and even Calgary. This helps TOTA and the communities they work with to determine where to send tourism campaigns, such as brochures and digital advertising.
“This is a lay of the land report, what kind of people are coming, where are they coming from and how long they are staying to create a baseline for a measure of success so the tourism plan for Greenwood makes sense for your community,” she said.
Highway traffic wasn’t included, Kneller explained, as that traffic would skew their tourism data. Their data looked at “sidewalk people,” or those who were actually taking time to walk around the city and spend time exploring.
This report is coming at a critical time, as Destination British Columbia is doing a large campaign on tourism along Highway 3 called Rainforest to Rockies, a mass campaign highlighting events and destinations from the coast to the B.C./Alberta border. Destination Canada is also promoting Highway 3 with a Prairies to Pacific campaign. The Boundary Country Chamber of Commerce is also working on its own tourism strategy.
Now is the time for Greenwood to figure out its tourism strategy to get on board with these campaigns.
“What we are here to do is help you get your voice across and work with you on what you want to advertise,” she said.
Greenwood CAO Dean Trumbley led the second half of the presentation, which looked at the current draft tourism strategy and the input people could add to tailor it based on experiences and the data presented. All in attendance were asked to write down their thoughts and experiences so city staff could add it to the draft strategy.
“With this baseline, we can now implement our tourism strategy, and in one year or two years we can run these numbers,” he said. “If it isn’t working, we can re-adjust, or if it is working, we know we can keep doing what we are doing,” said Trumbley.
Tourism has changed, he said, with people wanting more immersive experiences when visiting a community or area. Greenwood is going to have to take a similar approach, with everyone getting involved.
Excursionists are great, but there is plenty of room to get the overnight tourists to stay and spend more time and money. The city is likely going to be looking at planning multi-day events with several attractions for people to take in, looking at what assets already exist they can incorporate.
One thing the city does have going for it is living history, with more than 60 historical buildings. The market for historical, even paranormal experiences, is a market Greenwood could get into.
“One thing we could do, for example, is getting influencers to come, give them some free passes and branded material, and get them to run a video of ghost hunting exploring buildings,” he said. “There’s a lot of international history here that few people outside the city know about that we could really capitalize on.”
Greenwood doesn’t appear in many regional or provincial tourism initiatives, he said, but the blame falls on Greenwood itself. The city, all residents, businesses and nonprofits have to do more to raise the profile of the city, so it can be included in those initiatives.
There was a question over why asset management was part of the discussion, which Trumbley explained is because every building in Greenwood runs on the same infrastructure. The city needs to know the state of it to determine how it can proceed with developing and expanding tourism.
“No matter how you look at it, you, the taxpayers, own this, you vote for us to administer it,” he said.
The final document will be presented to the mayor and council for approval later in the summer.
