By Dennis Molnar
Courtesy Noel Buckley
Incoming President Noel Buckley wants to overhaul Ottawa Tourism’s advertising strategy.
The new head of Ottawa Tourism is eager to face the challenges his job will pose, much to the relief of businesses in the area struggling with a drop-off in visitors.
“Some of the challenges Ottawa has are not dissimilar to challenges that exist all over Canada,” says Noel Buckley, the new president of Ottawa Tourism. “But Ottawa’s got a nice broad base of tourism product, it’s got a nice broad base of tourism visitors, it’s a very well-rounded destination.”
Buckley, former president of Niagara Falls Tourism and the Niagara Fallsview Casino Resort, also held other provincial and national positions in the tourism industry before he took the job.
His arrival may breathe a breath of fresh air into Ottawa’s tourism industry which in recent years has faced relatively low visitor levels, especially from American tourists in the New England states.
Canadians have been travelling more domestically, making up some of the gap left by the absent American tourists.
But now, Canadians themselves are flocking south across the border to capitalize on the strongest dollar in over 30 years.
Among Centretown businesses there is little faith Ottawa Tourism can help with the problem.
Ian Wright, co-owner of The Snow Goose Canadian Crafts on Sparks Street, says the last three years of tourism in Ottawa “haven’t been great” but that there are many reasons for the languishing tourist levels.
“It’s not just what Ottawa Tourism is doing, this is certainly a national problem and there’s a lot of . . . different factors,” Wright says.
For him, creating new initiatives promoting the city not only in established markets but also in new ones is the key to raising visitor levels.
“Americans aren’t coming up the way they used to I think the main issue is advertising and getting advertising out internationally and into the states,” says Wright.
“I know B.C. and some of the eastern provinces have done really good jobs advertising their provinces for tourism and I don’t think Ontario has (advertised) broadly enough.”
But Sharon McKenna of the Sparks Street
Business Improvement Association is concerned that focusing advertising internationally will miss smaller local events the city has to offer.
“There are a lot of events in the city Ottawa Tourism is missing out on,” she says. “These events, such as the Buskers Festival, show what our city is about. It’s not just Winterlude and the Tulip Festival but smaller local ones,” McKenna says.
She points to co-operative advertising, where ad space is bought by two or more parties in bulk and sold at a reduced rate, as a way to expose local businesses to potential customers beyond their normal marketing reach.
Buckley admits he’s not yet fully immersed in the tourism plan for Ottawa, but he says prior experience means he understands the marketing challenges the city faces and what people want.
“When you’re talking about co-op advertising and partnering, what you try to do is come up with a program that works for the entire community for which there is mass and broad amount of buy-in,” he says.
Buckley says he wants to develop Ottawa “as a whole” as a destination for tourism by focusing on both iconic events and smaller ones.
It remains to be seen whether this combination of advertising and event exposure will sprout new interest in Ottawa as a destination for tourists both locally and world-wide.