February Industry News

Seven Days with the Giant

The Seven Days with the Giant campign is the major spring domestic leisure marketing campaign for the City of Thunder Bay. The campaign is a partnership between the City, Fednor, Northern Ontario Heritage Fund, Ontario Parks, Ontario Tourism Marketing Partnership, Nikon and local industry partners.

The campaign is designed to capitalize on the iconic value of the Sleeping Giant, strengthen the Superior By Nature brand for the city and position Thunder Bay as one of Canada's Great Outdoor cities. This awareness campaign will raise the profile in the community and provide excellent data on where the response comes from through the online contest prize package that gives a part of four a seven day Thunder Bay adventure worth $12 500.

2008 Calenders and postcards promoting the contest are available to distribute at your businesses to support the campaign.

Web Statistics

During the 2007 Calender year, visitors to http://www.visitthunderbay.com/ exceeded 330 000, up over 100% over 2006. For January 2008, web visitors are up 35% over January 2006. The on line visitor guide was downloaded over 31 000 times!

2007 Visitation Trends

• Total visitation (registered visitors at the Terry Fox Center) was up 7.8% over 2006


• Domestic visitors registaring at the Terry Fox Visitor Center were up nearly 14% over 2006


• U.S. visitor registrations were down 10.9% over 2006


• Overseas visitor registrations remained steady


• Currently 66% of our visitors are Canadaian, 23% are U.S. and 3% are from overseas, primarily Germany and Britain.
  

Upcoming Events

• Heritage Day - Fort William Historical Park - February 17th, 2008.


• Sibley Ski Tour - March 1, 2008.


• The Great Race http://www.greatrace.com/ is a New York to Paris round the world classic car race that will be stopping over in Thunder Bay June5-7. Residents are invited to welcome the race teams and visiting classic car associations from Canada and the U.S. midwest are expected to also arrive in the city.


• 2008 Bluesfest is scheduled for July 4-6 at Marina Park.


• 2008 Great Rendezvous at Fort William Historical Park July 10-13

2008 Visitor Experience Magazine

The 2008 Visitor Experience magazine is a new format 80 page fullfillment piece that replaces two separate guides produced in past years. The magazine features editorial content, tourism listings, maps and partner advertisements and is designed to have a shelf life of up to one year

The guides will be available by February 28th. Partners who wish to have them at their establishments for distribution can contact Tourism Thunder Bay at visit@thunderbay.ca

www.Visitthunderbay.com Opportunities

Our website is our #1 travel information source and thanks to the popularity of it, it has risen to the top of the google search engines in 2007. To ensure it remains easy for consumers to find, the number of businesses linking to and from it is vital.

We invite tourism businesses to add the visitthunderbay links on their websites to create recipricol links that boost web traffic. There is no charge and we provide links on our site as well. If you have any questions, please email me a ppepe@thunderbay.ca

Visitthunderbay.com is now on Facebook

Tourism Thunder Bay has launched a travel information group page on the popular networking site Facebook. Every day our visitor services staff list upcoming events and specials to the growing number of members who join. Weekly email messages updating group members on upcoming specials are also sent out. There are also a number of experience based forums on the site, allowing visitors to ask questions and have them answered by our staff or other members

If your tourism business has an event, lodging special, or package, please feel free to join the group and list your specials right on the discussion forums or wall postings. Otherwise, we encourage you to e-mail your specials or consumer oriented news to visit@thunderbay.ca

Current Active Travel Media

• Lake Superior Magazine-Sleeping Giant Park
  
• Canadian Geographic Travel-Sleeping Giant Park


• Coastal Living-Winter sauna experiences


• AAA Living Minnesota-Sleeping Giant Park


• Up Magazine (Westjet) -a pet traveller friendly city


• CAA magazine-Sibley Ski Tour


• GoRiding TV-produced a segment on motorcycle riding last fall to air in Southern Ontario markets


• In adiditon, Tourism Thunder Bay was featured in over 187 separate media industry articles in 2007 and to date in 2008, we have conducted over 45 separate interviews on topics ranging from cruise ships to visitor statistics, Seven days with the Giant and more.

Cruise Ship Developments

Tourism Thunder Bay has secured 11 port visits in 2009 by the M/V Clelia II, a 100 passenger cruise vessel operated by Travel Dynamics of New York City. This marks a new direction towards marketing itineraries aimed at smaller, expedition type cruise lines.

Conference Attraction

Tourism Thunder Bay continues to strengthen its marketing programs to attract more meeting and convention business to the community. We are always bidding on events and passing along leads. We will be undertaking direct marketing campaigns in 2008 targeting the mining and government sectors as well as attending key domestic meeting and convention planners trade shows. We will provide updates and information on an upcoming conference industry session in Thunder Bay to assist us in developing our next corporate marketing programs.

Sport Tourism

The City of Thunder Bay Tourism, and Recreation Divisions are currently developing a new Sport tourism attraction strategy. More news to follow as we will be planning a session shortly with local sport industry representatives to assist us in building new marketing programs to attract more sport events to the community.