Tourism Nanaimo has created its first visitor profile with information that could help local businesses and tourism industry develop more effective marketing strategies.
Kara Walsh, Tourism Nanaimo destination development specialist, said Nanaimo is one of the first communities to take part in the project, which actually started collecting visitor data in 2013.
“We’ve done it now for three consecutive summers in a row and we’ve budgeted to do this again for this coming summer, as well,” Walsh said.
Data for the report was collected through 11 ballot boxes dispersed in businesses, hotels where visitors were prompted with posters to take a visitor experience survey. Visitors leave their e-mail addresses in the boxes so they can be contacted to fill out the survey online.
An abbreviated one-page leaflet outlining results of some data collected will be distributed publicly, but the full profile will be reserved for businesses and organizations participating in the project, such as local hotels, Flying Fish, Nanaimo Museum and Nanaimo Airport, from across the Nanaimo region.
“This information is like gold,” Walsh said. “It’s extremely valuable. It gives us a really, really good cross section of visitors who are coming to Nanaimo.”
The profile shows the most common types of transport used to come to the Island, how long people stay, how long they planned their trips before coming here, what sources for planning trips to the Island travellers rely upon (58 per cent rely on friends and family), when people book activities during their visits, how they book them and who they book them with, how much money they spend here, who they travel with, preferred types of accommodation and what their favourite activities were while here and so on.
“Our top activities came out as our nature parks and trails, beaches and then our local shops, like our boutique shops,” Walsh said.
She said this kind of data is normally difficult and expensive to gather and collecting data directly through businesses gives more comprehensive information than if it were gathered from people stopping in to a tourist information centre.
The profile is the result of a project between Vancouver University and The Sociable Scientists research firm and Tourism Nanaimo.To learn more, please contact Walsh at Kara.Walsh@tourismnanaimo.com.
