Saturday, March 14, 2009

Bundling Experiences Caters to Consumers

Tourism Thunder Bay has seen a huge increase in its web based media presence in the past year with two significant developments undertaken in just the past two months.



The release of the new http://www.northernontario.travel/ web portal provides us the opportunity to manage the content relevant to our city. We've been able to upload pictures, itineraries, bundles and testimonials, showcasing the variety of experiences that exist within and outside of the city. We're posting new suggested itineraries weekly, suggesting a core activity, adding complimentary activities, than throwing in a culinary and accommodation suggestion to make it easier for consumers to find a memorable vacation experience. We've been developing the suggested bundles in house as well as accepting those from our partners.


We'd like this to evolve into a fuller collaborative marketing approach and welcome suggestions from our attractions, culinary, event and accommodation partners. Its an incredibly simple process and takes only minutes. Simply write down your attraction, a couple of similar or complimentary attractions, a culinary (restaurant, farmer's market, etc) and a accommodation (hotel, B and B, campsite, RV park, etc), email it to our content manager, (ebrewer@thunderbay.ca) and we'll post it to the portal. We may tweak and edit it a little but its essentially a very simple process that puts our partners in greater control of the content and gives us new experiences to showcase.


We're also always looking for photography from our partners as well to update our library. You can send photos (action shots are always great) to us via email or post them to the MyTBay.ca portal, from where we pull a lot of our new marketing images. The pic in this article was submitted to us via MyTBay.ca. Taken at the 2008 Wake The Giant Wakeboard festival, this type of pic showcass our city in a whole new dimension.


With our launch of the new http://www.visitthunderbay.com/ web site, we're encouraging new and existing tourism providers to take advantage of the opportunities, both free and paid advertising, to promote business on Thunder Bay's official and most comprehensive tourism site. With over 421 000 unique visitors and 16 million hits in 2008, the site is an excellent venue to promote tourism events, attractions, culinary and accommodation organizations cost effectively.


These are great tools that help drive information onto the screens and into the minds of potential visitors in a collaborative, cost efficient partnership approach. Feel free to browse both site, come up with some content and send it over to us.

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