Last week was Tourism Week in Saskatchewan, and in light of that fact the Yorkton Chamber of Commerce invited Pat Fiacco, CEO of Tourism Saskatchewan, to the city to speak about plans to make the province a vacation destination.
Tourism Saskatchewan has recently become a crown corporation, and Fiacco admits that many regions have had concerns about the new arrangement. He says that while he understands trepidation towards change, they have been working with operators throughout the province to help market the different destinations and find ways to help sell different regions of the province.
One of the success stories has been in Cypress Hills, he says, where the region has developed a website where people can set up vacation packages and easily find different activities to do in the region. He says the result of this is that people spent a longer time and more money in the region, as well as having a more rewarding vacation as they can access the different activities in the region easily. He says he hopes to see this become a model for more regions, to effectively sell everything they have to offer.
Among the new initiatives that Tourism Saskatchewan has to tackle is to make people realize that Saskatchewan is a vacation destination.
Fiacco says many people might know the province for its economy in recent years, but are otherwise unfamiliar with the region. He says it's his job now to educate people on the recreation side of Saskatchewan. In his own tours across the province it has shown him activities that he didn't know about, which emphasizes the need for better marketing.
One of those initiatives will be a new television campaign, which Fiacco says has been inspired by Newfoundland's success in marketing their province. He notes that they have hired Mary Taylor-Ash, who played a part in creating that campaign, and are going to try to highlight things people might take for granted in the province, such as the forests of Northern Saskatchewan or the opportunities for fishing and recreation.
"When you see those commercials on television, they don't even talk about tourism, they talk about Newfoundland and Labrador, and what it's like to be in Newfoundland and Labrador, whether as a visitor, a citizen, somebody working there, or somebody raising a family there, they're really quite magical. We're going to be attempting to create something very similar, which doesn't just speak to tourism in Saskatchewan, but speaks to life in Saskatchewan."
While the province has seen significant increases in new visits in recent years, Fiacco says that those are not the big visits that put a lot of money into the tourism industry. He says the goal of the campaign is to highlight the vacation opportunities that the province has.
"You can just imagine how we can improve those numbers if we tell the rest of the country what we have, and how affordable it is as well."
