Tourism Indicators #nlpoli

These days,  Chris Mitchelmore does what Steve Kent used to do:  hype tourism numbers.

More people.

Tourism is big.

Yay.

Hooray.

Yeah, well, take a breath.

Phake Photos Make Come Back #nlpoli

The Mighty Ceeb ran a story on Thursday about a block of three houses in downtown St. John’s.  Tourists and some residents are upset by a set of wires that one of the local phone companies has installed in front of the houses.

They quoted Les Cuff, who lives in one of the houses.

"Instead of having the three houses nicely unbroken, now you have three houses with a big bundle of wires in the middle, he said. "It just looks unsightly."

The guy lives there and he never noticed this stuff before?

The Marine Atlantic Disconnect

Consider if you will, the number of times a provincial government official – usually the tourism minister du jour – has bitched about the ferry service between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia.

The fares.

The schedule.

The ships.

Doesn’t matter:  Marine Atlantic supposedly sucks.

Now for the poor folks running Marine Atlantic, they just can’t win.  One minister refers to the ferries as constitutional cattle-cars.  People clog the open line shows to chime in their agreement.

So the company invests in a new boat with plenty of modern, trendy conveniences.

The same people bitch that it is too grand when all they need is the marine equivalent of a cattle-car.

Anyways, the latest round of bleating is about a fare increase to offset rising fuel costs.

Clyde Jackman issued a news release on October 6 predicting possible dire consequences resulting from the latest fare changes.

Diane Whelan did the bitching in June 2008.

In 2007, there was a bevy:

• December
• September, and
• February.

Okay.

Still following?

But, just a few weeks ago, Clyde was out there trumpeting the fact that “[n]on-resident traffic on Marine Atlantic is up 4.4 per cent over 2008, while resident traffic exiting the province is down almost one per cent…”.

So despite all the supposed problems, there are actually more people using the service this year compared last year.

That wasn’t good enough: by October 16 Jackman had decided that traffic on the ferries was actually up 5.2% from last year  And, said Jackman, “…we cannot continue to grow this industry without a reliable, affordable Gulf ferry service.”

But hang on a moment.

There is a problem here with the minister’s logic:

If the current ferry service is not reliable and is not affordable – according to the bitching to date – how can it be that the ferry traffic is growing?

Tut. Tut.

It’s really terrible to see this sort of pessimism coming from a provincial cabinet minister.

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How Irish we aren’t: airline version

So how come, with news of a new airline serving St. John’s, none of the locals have suggested trying to bring Ryanair to Newfoundland?

Stranded passengers.

Shagged-up check-in that causes some serious security issues.

An airline boss who muses about cutting the number of lavatories per aircraft to one AND charging to use it, or about imposing a fat tax on passengers and then basically tells disgruntled passengers to feck off.

For a crowd that spend most of their time bitching about travel to and from the island, Ryanair and Michael O’Leary would seem the perfect match.

 

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Tourism industry association caves on Gros Morne hydro towers

The province’s hospitality industry now supports the provincial government’s plans for Gros Morne national park, expressing their belief that a “balance” can be found in the government’s plan to sling hydro lines along 120-foot-high steel towers along the most visible, public portions of the park.

There’s a story in the Western Star from last week.

Hospitality Newfoundland and Labrador – the province’s tourism industry association -  issued an unprompted and undated statement  in early July that said:

…By being an active participant in this process and working with stakeholders to find the best solution, HNL is optimistic that a balance will be found. As business owners, the tourism industry understands the need to be financially prudent in making long term economic decisions and is confident that the long term economic and social impact of Gros Morne to the province is being considered during this process.

That statement appeared around the same time the Gros Morne story reared its head again publicly.  It came about a month after the provincial government created a new provincial tourism board.  The membership includes a bevy of current and former HNL heavyweights including HNL president Bruce Sparkes.

The language in the statement – especially the bit about being “financially prudent”  - matches perfectly the line taken by the Premier that he was prepared to sacrifice Gros Morne’s UNESCO status because the costs of going around the park might possibly, theoretically, be too high.  Financial prudence dictated the shortest route, especially if that extra money could be spent on health care instead.  Never mind that the province’s energy corporation would be building the lines with borrowed cash not money from the provincial treasury.

The Premier estimated the cost of going around the park at $100 million.  The provincial government currently has cash assets on hand of upwards of $1.8 billion.

By the time HNL issued its new position, the “long term economic and social impact” had already been considered of course, and promptly dismissed by the provincial government.

As the Western Star noted, the new HNL language is also radically different from the statement HNL made in February when the towers controversy first appeared.  Back then, there was an unequivocal statement that the towers were the wrong way to go:

"Running towers in front of dynamic and dramatic landscape is going to take away from the natural beauty of it," [HNL president Bruce] Sparkes said. [CBC story]

"From a photographic, awe-inspiring point of view, it's going to take away that. And who wouldn't say, 'Gee, too bad they put that pole line there?'"

What hasn’t changed in the government position, as expressed by the Premier:

“When park officials look at what the trade-off happens to be for the benefits we get at the end of day ... I think they will see the benefit,” he said.

Seems like that happened, but not to the park people. Who knows?  Maybe the HNL rethink was aided by a few phone calls and e-mails.

What makes the HNL about-face even more spectacular  something your humble e-scribbler noted back in early July when the erection story heated up again:  “the surest way to put an end to any news story about the threat to Gros Morne  from the potentially unnecessary infeed from the Lower Churchill – if that even gets built – is to have the tourism people state publicly that having Gros Morne festooned with steel girders and power lines  is just a lot of fuss about nothing at all.”

The tourism people have spoken.

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Cruising the numbers

The local tourism industry is a notorious spin machine, constantly trying to make things sound as magically delicious as possible.

That may be great for marketing but the hyper-torque makes it very difficult for anyone trying to get a handle on what the actual trends are in tourism or if all the money spent is bringing real dividends.

Take the local cruise ship marketing crowd for instance.  Their website is famous for predicting banner years in visitors, but the actual performance sometimes comes a little shy of the forecast.

In 2008, the tourism marketing agency predicted there’d be 60,000 passengers and crew visiting the province. The actual number was 50,000.  In fact, between 2005 and 2008, the number of passengers and crew from cruise ships has ranged between 50,000 (the low for the period) and 55,500 in 2007. The cruise authority’s forecasts are something else again.

This year, the prediction is for 65,000 visitors bolstered by provincial government cash. In fact, what catches the eye in a government news release is this claim:

Newfoundland and Labrador’s cruise industry has experienced significant growth in recent years. The latest industry research projects a 38 per cent growth rate since 2008 in the number of passengers and crew visiting the province – to exceed 65,000 visitors in 2009.

Since they don’t tell us what the performance was before 2008, we don’t know the basis on which the “research” makes the projection and we certainly don’t know how much growth there has been.

Usually a lack of concrete information is the first sign of bullshit and in this case, you’d be right on. Once you’ve checked the numbers, you’d discover that they’ve actually been pretty stable over the last four “recent” years.  Between 2007 and 2008, the trend was decidedly downward.

That second sentence is a bit dodgy as well since it holds out a prediction for this year compared to last year but without any solid underpinning.

Now once you have the numbers, you can also start to question basic math skills.  65,000 visitors in 2009 would represent 15,000 more than actually showed up in 2008.

That’s 30% more, not 38%.

But that number “38” didn’t wind up there by accident.  It was probably cut and pasted from an earlier news release.

You see 38% would be the increase CANAL predicted earlier this year when they were forecasting there’d be 69,000 cruise visitors in 2009.

Luckily they didn’t cut and past the earlier earlier prediction:  a 56% increase - 78,000  - in cruise ship visitors to in Newfoundland and Labrador in 2009. 

In other words, in the space of a few weeks, the cruise authority’s “research” forecast a 56% increase, then successively smaller numbers until this most recent one which is now 13,000 visitors lower than their first prediction.

Now the cruise ship industry, like the whole tourism industry, is a key part of the local economy.  Unfortunately, when it comes to facts, there are some in the industry who prefer the stuff that sounds good over the stuff you can measure. That’s too bad because every one of these visitors is a real visitor bringing new money into the economy.  Whether there are 50,000 of them this year or 60-, 65-, 70- or 78, 000, that’s a good thing.

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Phake photos add up to more tourism travails

As you can see at Geoff Meeker’s blog and at labradore, the provincial tourism departments advertising campaigns are marred by what amounts to fake photography.

That is, the company behind the campaign has taken a couple of shots and then through a series of deletions and additions created something that actually doesn’t exist all in aid of getting people to come here to experience something which is, according to one advert, as far from Disneyland as you can get.

Uh huh.

Now that might actually be true since the evidently invented, fanciful and ultimately fake stuff you experience at Disneyland or Disney World actually exists at the theme park.

The stuff in the pictures does not.

So at least in that bit they told the truth, just not in the way most people would take the meaning if they didn’t know the little photoshop of horrors involved.

To give you some sense of the manipulation involved both blog posts include both unedited shots and the doctored outcomes. 

It’s worth taking the time to look at both just to see not only how much doctoring has been done but how much the sights didn’t need the creativity of the Picassos of pixilation.

This is just the latest in a string of problems in the tourism ministry over the past few years.  The province’s energy corporation plans to drive a string of gawdawful high voltage electricity towers right through a UNESCO World heritage site.  Never mind that one of the tourism television ads this year highlights Gros Morne as a destination known for its unspoiled natural beauty, as you’ll see in Meeker’s post.

Nope, seems the geniuses at NALCO think the rest of us just need to be “educated” on why their solution  - 43 metre high towers right along key sight lines - is the only one that’s right. 

Then there was last summer’s little round of bullshit  - as we noted not once, not twice but thrice - with the billboard along the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto.

And all of that comes against the backdrop of an advertising campaign that is costing about double what it did four years ago but which isn’t seeing comparable growth in the actual numbers of  real tourists. 

In fact, the only real growth to speak of has been in locals who stay home in the summer.  They are doing that not because of watching tourism spots on CTV Newsnet every 15 bloody minutes but because it’s cheaper to stay home than travel what with the dollar at less than par.

Now that lack of results is not so much an issue with the advertiser as it is with the department headed up by a minister who is, for the most part, one of those resident visitors to the capital city region his department likes to talk about.

You see, the minister hits the taxpayers with the bills for his visits to the office in St. John’s rather than buy or rent a home here out of his own expenses like the rest of us would have to do.  He’s not alone either; almost half the cabinet nails the taxpayers for the cost of travel back and forth between their offices in St. John’s and their homes in various parts of the province.

To get back to the point:  the problem is that the current administration’s whole master plan for tourism has been to simply throw money into advertising.  That’s their phantasmagorical never-seen-before-in-the-history-of-human-civilization strategy, and despite the evidence that sheer volumes of dollars don’t work, they are determined to carry on with all the ingenuity of Douglas Haig.

When it comes to authentic tourism events, the minister – like his entire cabinet seatmates – don’t seem to know anything beyond trying to get the feds to pony up.  The sorts of people who come to Newfoundland and Labrador  go to places to see something different and real, something that actually is as far from Disneyland as you can imagine.

Too bad our whole tourism promotion is built around fakery.

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Authentic

No sweat to tell the difference between a public relations professional who knows how to use the tools to do the job compared with well, the opposite.

On the opposite side, we have this ham-fisted piece of nonsense from the company doing advertising for the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador. Incidentally, the ham-fist is not the billboard on the Gardiner.

Then compare it to Joseph Thornley's personal pictures from a recent holiday in Prince Edward Island. Sure he used it as a means to talk about how easily he uploaded the great photos to his blog and to Flickr, but what he is telling is a simple story of someone who went to the Island, had a great time, took gorgeous pictures and then uploaded them to the Internet complete with geotags.

I uploaded about 100 pictures of the attractions and historic areas of Charlottetown, North Rustico Harbour (the epitome of a Canadian east coast village), the beaches and cliffs of Prince Edward Island Park (look for the picture of the fox that trotted right up to our car while holding a rabbit in its mouth) and, of course, Green Gables (if you’re the parent of a girl, you’ll know what that is.)

I uploaded photos from my flickr page directly to PlanetEye. It was simple. Took about 2 minutes for each batch of 20 to 25 pictures. And then the geotagging worked perfectly. I simply dragged and dropped my photos onto a map in the location where I’d taken them.

The difference between the two approaches is a simple word: authentic. Thornley's experience carries with it all the credibility of someone who has actually been there and done it. There's a story to be told here and the pictures are part of the whole thing.

Now theoretically, he could be working for the PEI tourism department or the software companies he mentions but nothing on the site would suggest he is. Ethically he'd be obliged to disclose such a connection and base don a number of factors, including the fact he doesn't comment on the issue, it's a reasonable assumption that he isn't. Note that one of Thornley's viewers chides him about the software developer.

Even after a suspicious mind has gone to that point and returned, you come back to the integrity and the sincerity of the post.

His last line, which will be seen by thousands in exactly the demographic Islanders are looking to hit, says it all:

If you’re interested in an unspoiled place for a summer vacation, take a look at Charlottetown on PlanetEye or at my Charlottetown photo set on Flickr .

A simple call to action - for you marketers out there - and the links are left in it so you can act, just as Thornley would have wanted.

Compare that to the other thing. There was a conventional media story in the billboard. The thing would have to be pitched and worked to get coverage.

A n Internet search turned up this story online, albeit in a media trade publication. There's another mention, again from a trade publication that focus es on the agency and not the client. The Telly had a picture on July 11. Notice this story appeared the very same day as the release, suggesting it was organized ahead of time.

There might be other stuff but it sure as heck isn't turning up online where the video and the story of the billboard had a chance to go truly viral.

If handled properly.

And that's the catch.

This was a potentially hot new media story, completely with daily blog posts about the development, complete with amateur video done by the creators as they were doing it. Three weeks worth of material is stuff most blogs would kill for, especially stuff as compelling as that. When you combine the story inherent in the billboard production with the authentic flavour of a local artist hired to complete the work you have a truly delightful tale that tells itself.

And seriously, except in a world where agency self-stroking is the goal, the trade pubs that showed up in the search are useless to accomplishing the client goal of boosting the number of people who don't usually come this way headed to the farthest eastern airports in the country.

It's not like the record on this over the past couple of years has been anything to write home about, although plenty has been written and spoken at home about it.

Throwing more cash into tourism advertising isn't necessarily the way to go in a highly competitive market at a time when it's tough to get people to travel.

Being genuinely creative in your approach - being authentic - sure can make a difference. As the great advertising persuader put it, authenticity helps break through the wall of cynicism about advertising generally.

It's easy to talk about authenticity, but sometimes it's pretty obvious that some people don't get what the word means.

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More bang for the buck.

There's no secret to it, fat or otherwise.

It doesn't cause cancer, nor is it a secret cancer cure.

It's definitely green, though, as in green like all outdoors.

Natural.

Pristine.

The green of the ocean showing against the white of a gigantic iceberg breaking up on the north east coast of Newfoundland, near a place called Twillingate.

If you want to draw people to Newfoundland and Labrador, you can spend 11 million bucks and show them pictures of a local musician - as fine as he is - in an entirely contrived setting being quaint and folksy and cliched, or you can show them this:

Done correctly, the power of social media could earn a much greater return on investment than anything seen in this province thus far.

Bear in mind, the growth in the number of real tourists - those from outside Newfoundland and Labrador - hasn't really matched the growth in the money spent to lure them here using the old methods.

It's called the Law of Diminishing Visitor Returns.

Let's see if we can change that with the cost of zero dollars and a little Internet promotion, not counting Wilma Hartmann's travel expenses.

From cliche to nature.

Call it the green shift.

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