The United Kingdom is Alberta’s largest source of European tourists and revenue. In the U.K., as with many of Canada’s target markets, the primary barrier to visiting Canada is knowledge and itinerary guidance.
Generally, our target consumers don’t understand the destination and find it difficult to visualize a holiday to Canada and Alberta. This leads us to partner with Tourism British Columbia in some of our marketing efforts, promoting the idea of Canada's West to the UK consumer.
Travel Alberta will reach its targeted customers from the United Kingdom via four channels: consumer, travel trade, media and public relations and meetings conventions and incentive travel. The largest investment will be via the consumer channel.
Situational Overview
- Strengths
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- Alberta suppliers with market knowledge, who are active in targeting the U.K. trade and consumer
- Close working relationship and information sharing with the CTC and other U.K.-based provinces, in particular Tourism B.C.
- Favourable relations with the travel trade and media
- Weaknesses
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- Alberta product beyond the main icons is under represented
- TravelAlberta.com does not have sufficient scope for country-specific pages and cannot easily be used as an effective tool to support activities and marketing initiatives in the U.K.
- Direct entry statistics don’t accurately reflect leisure visitor numbers to Alberta
- Opportunities
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- Ability to package/promote new and enhanced product offerings for all four seasons including experiences beyond traditional touring
- High incidence of traffic from visiting friends and relatives in Canada
- U.K. visitors’ willingness to travel long-haul and their resilience as travellers in the current economic downturn
- Good air access to Alberta and two international gateway cities
- Threats
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- Airfares to Canada are higher than those of competitive destinations (in particular the U.S.)
- Weak economic conditions in the U.K. and unfavourable exchange rate
- Competing national tourism offices are all targeting U.K. travellers
- Global events that curtail consumers’ desire to travel and are impossible to foresee or control – ash clouds, strikes, terrorism, etc.