Attracting Americans

Despite a soft U.S. American economy and a decline in American tourists to the region in the past 10 years, there is still a lot of promise in the American tourism market, said Paul Pepe.
 
“You still have 75 million Americans with passports; you still have 35 to 40 million Americans who live within a 12-hour drive from the city,” said the city’s tourism manager. “It’s not a market you can completely ignore.”

American represent about 20 per cent of Thunder Bay’s tourism economy and Pepe said they’ve had to do more consumer research to pinpoint U.S. travel trends.

While there was still a decline in American visitors in 2010, the city did see a shift in the traffic.

“We saw a shift away from the traditional markets and we saw an increase in touring,” he said, adding more people stop in the city as they travel through while on a tour of Lake Superior. “That is where, in the city, we saw the increases.”

American tourism is usually high in the hunting and fishing markets, but Pepe said with the weak U.S. economy the last couple of years, they’ve seen a decline there.

“We’re still seeing opportunities there to rebound, to grow,” he said.

Northwestern Ontario’s outdoor opportunities are something Pepe will be focusing on when he travels to Chicago Tuesday for a Canadian tourism consumer show. A partnership with the Ontario Tourism Marketing Corporation to promote the outdoor adventures that exist in the region; it’s a campaign that saw some promising numbers last year.

“We’ll be there with the provincial banner – to really carry the Ontario brand and to promote the sub-regions,” Pepe said. “It’s part of this regional tourism organization structure that the Ministry of Tourism and Culture has rolled out in the last year. We’re taking a leadership role in Northwestern Ontario to help work with the province to work with regional partners to collaborate to allow us to move the industry further ahead.”