Canada’s Tourism industry is in trouble.

“Canada’s tourism sector is on the brink of a crisis today, and we need urgent action from governments at all levels to address some longstanding structural burdens on our industry,”

said Randy Williams, President and CEO of Tourism Industry Association of Canada in a recent press release and on the CTV National News.

The “why’s” of this trouble vary - SARS, gas prices, border crossing problems, the “high Canadian dollar”, “structural” problems, etc. - but the real reason is somewhat different; we have gotten lazy. For almost 20 years, Canada has relied on US travelers to support most of our tourism and we have been able to do so because a) they were close and b) the Canadian dollar was worth about 2/3rds of the American dollar. Put simply, we were a fantastic vacation choice for the American market and got complacent about it - but nothing lasts forever.

Last November, I was out in Vancouver for the Canada e-Connect tourism conference. I have to say, I was impressed with how forward thinking and innovative the people at the conference were. More importantly, none of the people I talked with were complacent and that most certainly included the people at the Canadian Tourism Commission. I was particularly impressed with some of the work being done by Eugene Thomlinson at the CTC looking at motivations for travel.

I have done some work myself looking at travel motivations - mainly at the cultural level - while Eugene’s work concentrates at the psycho-demographic level. These two are not incompatible and, indeed, I am looking forward to sitting down with Eugene sometime in the future and seeing if we can create an integrated model that combines cultural patterns and psycho-demographics. Until we do, however, I wanted to take a stab at looking at travel motivations and, in particular, the motivations of people who travel to Canada.

If you look at the tourism data provided by Statistics Canada and the CTC, one of the things that jumps out a you is how much of it is based on VFR - Visiting Friends and Relatives. The second thing that jumps out, although you have to dig a bit deeper, is that once people come to Canada, they have a significant tendency to return to Canada. Why?

In all too many cases, the VFR data is passed over - “Oh, that’s understandable…”. Personally, I think that is a major mistake. How many of us have friends we have made online who we have never physically met? I know that I do. Indeed, the development of online friends and their “conversion” into “tourists” was the topic of several discussions I had with people at the Canada e-Connect conference. As our communities become more fragmented and increasingly mediated through online (rather than physical) sites, we are more likely to want to “visit” our friends physically, if for no other reason than to get the face to face contact we crave as social beings.

How about that second piece of data: that people who come to Canada tend to return? Why? This may be hard for many Canadians to understand, but we have built a rather amazing society and we have been lucky enough to have a fantastic natural environment. Both of these are “draws” for people to come to Canada.

Unfortunately, historically we have only pushed the “Nature” card in most of our tourism advertising which, in my opinion, is a major mistake. “Nature”, for many people in Europe and Asia, can be a source of “awe” in the very classical sense of that word. It can be too big, too grand, and to terrifying for many people whose cultures have had a high population density for generations. The converse is true as well; much of Europe and Asia are cramped and crowded to Canadian sensibilities. You can see, and feel, the differences between, say, Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver on the one hand and Paris, Leipzig and Vienna on the other. In Canada, “nature” is seen by many who don’t live here as “wild” or “untamed”; an image our advertising has reinforced. In Europe (or Korea, Japan, etc.), “nature” is more “cultivated”; not “tame”, but held in check.

In Canada, we have valourized the contest between Nature and Man, and this was certainly reflected in the skills that I was taught as a child (canoing, camping, survival skills, hunting, etc.). These skills are rare in Europe and Asia; a throwback to an earlier time and culture - something that is only learned by adventurers and explorers and of no use in “civilization”. When we base our advertising on a valourization of the contest, we are misreading our audience and, at the same time, misreading the reality of travel in Canada.

I am not by any means trying to say that one cannot find a place to test yourself against Nature in Canada. Of course you can if you wish to, and many still do. At the same time, when we look at the reality of our tourism infrastructure, what we are really “selling” is not so much a “contest with Nature” as it is a chance to experience a “Civilized Nature”. We have not “tamed” Nature so much as we have entered into a symbiotic relationship with Nature which allows us to experience Nature without having to contest it. It is this symbiotic relationship, amongst other things, that encourages people to return to Canada.