– Paul Nursey is the President and CEO of Tourism Victoria. For more information, please visit www.tourismvictoria.com.
GREATER VICTORIA – Tourism Victoria and the City of Victoria made headlines earlier this month after reaching an historic agreement that ensures a solid footing for the Island’s tourism economy. It was a complex deal, but I want to draw your attention to one key element.
Having Tourism Victoria take on the leadership of the sales and marketing for the Victoria Conference Centre is just smart business. For 28 years, there were two distinct teams working to bring meetings and conferences to Greater Victoria.
City of Victoria staff led efforts to sell space for major conferences in the Victoria Conference Centre, while Tourism Victoria worked to secure meetings and conference business in hotels and off-site venues.
This inevitably led to resource-sucking squabbles over who got what share of Victoria’s accommodation taxes.
Thankfully, this territoriality has been put behind us with a new focus squarely on building the business. It took leadership, collaboration and the parking of egos, but I am proud that we have made it happen.
We can now continue to integrate sales and marketing efforts into one cohesive unit, which is what we have been working towards since reaching an agreement in principle in November 2015.
The private sector firmly supports this. First of all, our synergized efforts will create more leverage in the marketplace and, ultimately, more city-wide conventions of a size that can only be held in the Victoria Conference Centre.
This increase in business will create what the tourism sector calls “compression.” In this incidence it means that, if we are able to fully book the Victoria Conference Centre, opportunities will open for others, such as meetings venues or hotels, to pick up any spillover business.
Compression is a central concept in the meetings and accommodation industries. The sooner big hotels and venues downtown are full, the sooner hotels and venues in the suburbs benefit. All sophisticated operators understand the principle of compression.
Greater Victoria is already benefitting from sold out conference centres in Seattle and nearly sold out venues in Greater Vancouver. The same applies on south Vancouver Island. As the Victoria Conference Centre fills up, venues and hotels from Sooke through to Bear Mountain and out to Sidney will benefit from stronger compression throughout our overall region.
Another benefit is that businesses who service conferences — motor coach companies, meeting planners, caterers, excursion providers — can work with one integrated team going forward, as opposed to two separate teams as they needed to in the past.
Less energy spent on politics and protection of turf, and more getting down to the business of our core competencies of sales and marketing in order to grow tourism business and create stronger underlying demand in a sustainable way for the entire region.
Now that’s a great idea.
