Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Partnership Opportunities Abound with Tourism Thunder Bay's Newest Program

Tourism Thunder Bay is partnering with Ontario Tourism Marketing Partnership, Canadian Tourism Commission, Porter Airlines, the Thunder Bay International Airport Authority, North of Superior Tourism and Sunset Country to highlight Thunder Bay as one of Canada’s Best Outdoor Cities in the 2010 Canada’s Great Outdoors campaign targeting the Chicago metropolitan marketplace.

This multi-channel media campaign will kick off January, 2010 and continue until May 31, 2010 utilizing print, web, radio and consumer show opportunities. The campaign promotes Northwestern Ontario as a premium destination for avid outdoor adventure seekers and our involvement will promote Thunder Bay as the major gateway city for air and road based travel markets.

Tourism Thunder Bay’s strategy aligns with the regional and provincial tourism strategies to maximize leveraged partnerships and capitalize on consumer research driven opportunities. The Chicago market has been identified in the Northern Ontario Tourism Marketing Strategy as a key growth market for Northwestern Ontario tourism industry and has been noted as an area of growth in Thunder Bay’s travel market for several years. The addition of Porter Airlines to the market in 2009 opens a new corridor travel option and has helped facilitate development of this particular partnership model.

Porter Airlines is contributing a 10% promotional code throughout the campaign period on their Chicago to Thunder Bay route and this project marks new involvement by the Canadian Tourism Commission to promote Northern Ontario in its key North American markets. Tourism Thunder Bay will feature an enhanced web tool to help travelers select local accommodation, vehicle rental, complimentary attractions, and outdoor equipment retailers to increase local economic impacts, build brand awareness around the “Its in our Nature” campaign and strengthen our brand positioning statement as being on of the country’s best outdoor cities. The tagline throughout our component of the campaign will be “Canada’s Great Outdoors begins in Canada’s Great Outdoor City.”

The campaign will be complimented by a Chicago area radio contest based campaign that will offer two all expense paid trips for two to Thunder Bay and into the region for angling vacations with airfare courtesy of Porter Airlines.

This partnership is part of our commitment to explore new markets based on consumer research and alignment with the provincial tourism strategy to build a stronger local and regional tourism economy and expand the economic impacts of our local tourism industry beyond our traditional partnership base. This partnership is also being developed to build new relationships with the regional resource based tourism industry and encourage them to promote Thunder Bay as a gateway to their clients as well.

We are welcoming opportunities from our Thunder Bay tourism partners to add to the Porter Airlines discount concept and list, free of charge, your own special promotional rates or codes on a Tourism Thunder Bay landing page that will link from the www.CanadasGreatOutdoors.com web portal. If you are interested in participating with a link or a web based promotional offer of your own, please email me at ppepe@thunderbay.ca and we’ll load it to the landing page over the coming weeks.

We’re looking forward to your participation in this innovative new marketing partnership.

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