TravelMole interview,: Michele McKenzie, president and CEO, Canadian Tourism Commission
She has been on the job for less a month, but Michele McKenzie readily acknowledges the critical need to entice tour operators and travel agents to steer clients to Canada. “The Canadian Tourism Commission has only one mandate, and that is to market Canada as a destination,“ the new president and CEO of the Canadian Tourism COmmission told TravelMole. “Working with the travel trade has been critically important to us, and we’re finding that it’s going to be even more important within the global marketplace we’re competing in,“ she added. The US market is Canada’s largest internationally, but that market shrunk last year by 14% compared to the previous year. “Our analysis was that Americans in 2003 were taking more trips at home than they were taking internationally. We were impact by that, and there was a number of other world crisis’s that also affected Canada,“ said Ms McKenzie. She readily admits that some programs with travel agents may need to be improved. “We had a Canada Specialist program that in the past has not performed as well as we would like. We’re reviewing that whole situation now,“ she said. She said fam trips would continue for agents, but that the Commission would also be looking into other methods of enticing visitors to Canada, where the tourist business is economically critical because it is among the top ten industries. “Some of us were kind of pontificating a few years ago about the future of travel agents. There were a lot of dire predictions, but luckily that has not been the case,“ she said. In the past, she said, agents sometimes were not as well acquainted with the diversity offered by a country with vast natural resources. “The biggest challenge we have in terms of assisting travel agents is to improve their awareness of Canada and the diversity of Canadian product, so that they can help create a better demand,” Ms McKenzie said.
David
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