Direction Ontario Offers Francophone Tourism Market Toolkit and Workshop

Direction Ontario, the Provincial organization responsible for marketing to to the Francophone market, is conducting workshops across all thirteen RTO regions to provide a better understanding of the potential of the Francophone market, both within the Province and into Quebec.

For the Thunder Bay and Northwestern Ontario region, the Francophone market remains a small segment of our overall Canadian travel demographics. Based on registration data collected at our visitor centres, and compared with Ministry of Tourism's regional profile data, the Francophone market currently makes up approximately 3.5% of the 435 000 Canadian travellers to the city annually. However, given the significance of French influence in the development of the modern economy of the region and a strong french cultural fabric in the area, there is a core product that is or is close to being market ready to attract the Quebec touring segment.

A Webinar session for Region 13C is scheduled for February 24th, 2011 from 8:30 to 11 AM (EST).

The session will provide an better understanding of the toolkit they've developed to help Ontario's tourism industry understand the Francophone market. The workshop will also provide an analysis of the travel motivators of the Francophone traveller and will give an assessment of the state of Ontario's Francophone ready product and provide evaluation tools to help our tourism industry respond to the needs of that segment of the market better. The session will wrap up with a round table discussion of emerging product that could become market ready and an overview of the services Direction Ontario provides.

To Register, contact Louise Lacroix At louise.lacroix@directionontario.ca by Wednesday February 23rd.

To participate in the conference, visit Megameeting.com and enter Direction Ontario as the Meeting Host and enter "francophonemarkets13cworkshop" as the meeting name. To connect a land line, call 1-866-737-8517 and pass code 9860105