It’s not often that after-dinner conversation turns to sucking and blowing, but there was talk of little else, Feb. 12, as local musician Brian Lackey taught dinner-goers how to play the harmonica.
The participants were at Fiddle River for a three-course meal—including a cabane à sucre dessert—as part of SHiFT, a four-day Travel Alberta pilot project aimed at teaching provincial tour operators and business owners how to create new experiential tourism products.
The harmonica lesson, which had all 24 participants playing Mississippi Fred McDowell’s You Gotta Move, was just one of many examples that were created for the conference, in hopes of inspiring innovative new ideas.
SHiFT began Feb. 11 with a “History Mystery” at the Heritage Train Station. The event featured an interactive play, performed by the Jasper Theatre Company, and included a horse and buggy ride.
The following day, between workshops, participants learned about wildlife cameras at the Palisades Stewardship Education Centre, and that evening they ate dinner, while listening to the musical stylings of Lackey on the guitar and watching
Jasper artist Claude Boocock paint Mount Tekkara. (The painting was later spontaneously auctioned off for $300.)
Other activities included learning to personalize, sew and stuff one of Elliott Ingles and Megan Vincente’s Mountains and Monsters pillows, while hearing about the creation and growth of their business; and a Taste of Jasper dinner that took conference-goers to the Raven Bistro for appies, Evil Dave’s for entrees and the Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge for dessert and a culinary challenge.
Travel Alberta is pushing for new experiential tourism offers to attract more travellers to the province, so it can increase its annual tourism revenue by about $3 billion.
“Our goal is to generate $10.3 billion in tourism revenue by 2020, and one of the things that we absolutely know is we can’t keep doing things the way we’ve always done them and expect an increase,” said Marty Ebreth, Travel Alberta’s director of business development.
She said, because travellers are changing, the same old attractions aren’t enough to grow the industry. According to Ebreth, travellers want engagement; they want local insights and they want to connect with people and places.
“If you think back to 20 years ago, many people were happy to take their family on a vacation and park there for 10 days, or get on the bus and travel from Point A to Point B with a large group—we’re evolving as travellers, and as the traveller changes, we as the tourism industry have to keep pace with that.”
In an effort to keep up, Travel Alberta created SHiFT, modelling it after Edge of the Wedge—the experiential tourism conference in Newfoundland’s Gros Morne National Park.
The goal of the conference is to get tourism operators to think outside the box and to come up with new, marketable experiential tourism offers that meet the evolving needs of today’s traveller.
“Travel Alberta’s goal was to have 12 new experiences out on the market in the next two years,” said Nancy Arsenault, one of the conference facilitators. “But, if I was gambling in Vegas, I’d say there will be 12 in this first year. I’m serious, and that for us is exciting.”
Arsenault said the reason for that success is because the right people signed up for the conference—the people who want to grow their businesses and raise the bar.
Ebreth pointed to Patrice Fortin, owner of Fiddle River, saying, “he’s probably the perfect example of what we hoped would come out of the experiences that will leave the SHiFT legacy in the town of Jasper.”
Fortin is looking at different variations of his cultural evening of music and art that he could offer to individuals, small groups and large groups.
“So Patrice is looking at three very distinctly different opportunities that he has to refine and tweak. That’s a really fabulous outcome from a training perspective,” said Arsenault.
Experiential tourism isn’t a new trend; it’s a fundamental shift in the way people travel.
“It started in 1999 when we started to talk about the experience economy,” explained Arsenault, “and when we started to understand that there was a new level of value in the business world, more than commodities, goods and services: this thing called experiences.”
“Experiences have occurred for thousands of years,” continued Celes Davar, Arsenault’s business partner and co-facilitator, “but they’ve never been put together commercially—that’s what’s changing, we’re putting a price point on it.”
Davar said because we’ve moved beyond a goods and services economy and into an experience economy, the tourism industry is trying to reestablish its place.
“In tourism particularly, we’re trying to figure out what is an experience and how does it fit into Jasper as a destination, how does it fit into Lethbridge as a community, how does it fit into Cyprus as a park?”
The answers to those questions are becoming clearer with the help of the Canadian Tourism Commission’s Explorer Quotient research, which provides the tourism industry with a greater understanding of each destination’s target market.
For example, under the Explorer Quotient, Jasper attracts free spirits, cultural explorers and authentic experiencers. With that knowledge, the community’s tourism operators can tailor their experiences to those specific travellers, ensuring the best possible experience for our visitors.
“Explorer Quotient research has given us better insights into what the traveller does want, so we can keep that focus and, literally, it’s like being able to look inside the person that you want as your customer and knowing exactly what they’re interested in, so you can deliver on it,” explained Ebreth.
With that knowledge and the training they received during the four-day conference, tourism operators left SHiFT with a whole arsenal of new ideas for their businesses.
Shellie Crittenden, the advertising promotions coordinator for WinSport in Calgary, said ideas started percolating as soon as the conference started.
“It was incredible,” she said. “At the end of day four, I’ve got at least four ideas running through my head to go back with.”
Participants in the SHiFT pilot program will have their registration fees reimbursed once they develop a new experiential tourism product that enhances Alberta’s offer.
The program is currently scheduled to run for three years, in three different towns, but if interest continues there is potential for it to become an annual event and perhaps return to Jasper.
Nicole Veerman
[email protected]
