Giulia Malcangio, from Rome, Italy, has been busy the last few days in Calgary helping set up booths and exhibits for the major Global Petroleum Show in the city.
It's her first visit to the city. First visit to Canada.
"As soon as I have one hour available, I'd like to (take in some tourist attractions)," she said.
"First of all I heard about very nice people being here and that's what I am also experiencing."
As for what she'd like to see, she replied: "The (Calgary) Tower, of course. I heard about that and I'd like to be there. Downtown. Actually I heard I need to go to Banff, but I'm not sure if I will have the time."
Malcangio is one of more than 4.5 million visitors to Calgary each year fuelling a tourism industry that generates just over $1 billion to the local economy.
And Tourism Calgary is on a mission to increase that number by embarking on an ambitious marketing plan.
Randy Williams, president and CEO of Tourism Calgary, told the Herald a strategic, three-year marketing plan will be released in October.
Today, during Tourism Week in Canada, the organization officially launched a new website to attract visitors to the city.
"That's a big investment and will help make Calgary competitive with other destinations in North America," said Williams. "We've been behind on our website and we know that most people today will certainly use the Internet to explore travel options. So the Internet will allow us to be much more competitive that way."
Tourism Week is a national celebration bringing focus to the importance of tourism to the Canadian economy and the Calgary economy.
"A lot of people don't know the diversity and the importance of the tourism industry, not only to the economy but also to their own quality of life. If you took agriculture, forestry, mining and fishing, those four industries (in Canada), and put them together, tourism is bigger than those four industries combined," said Williams.
Tourism Week runs through to Sunday.
"I think Calgary has a lot of room to grow. Our occupancy for the city as far as hotel rooms are concerned is below the 70 per cent level for the year. So we have some capacity there," said Williams. "We know we have some capacity in our airlines. The airport's growing. That's going to need to be sustained. We know the attractions can take more folks.
"The global tourism economy and the Canadian tourism economy is expected to grow about four to six per cent over the next decade each year. So Tourism Calgary's hope is that we can outpace the Canadian tourism growth of four to six per cent. We've got to look at ways to grow by five, seven, eight per cent per year. And certainly the capacity is there to do that within the city."
Brent Ritchie, professor of tourism at the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary and chair of the World Tourism Education and Research Centre at Haskayne, said he doesn't think tourism has been a priority here.
"It's not like B.C. where tourism is important," he said, adding that the potential for growth is there. "But it won't come easily. It will take work."
Joseph Clohessy, president of the Calgary Hotel Association, said there are about 11,500 rooms in the Calgary market right now and the average rate was down slightly from $137.73 to $136.31 at the end of April.
Occupancy has also dropped by 5.3 percentage points from 70 per cent to 64.7 per cent.
"That would be attributed somewhat obviously to some of the bigger citywide events we had the year before. Tim Hortons Brier would be an example of that. All things considered going from April of last year that was probably the height of the downturn through the summer, we weren't quite sure where things were going," he said.
"But that's (occupancy) probably a good number in looking at some of the other markets in North America and some of the drops they've seen."
In 2008, overnight visitors to Calgary were mainly from Alberta, 44 per cent, followed by other Canadians, 28 per cent, the United States, 10 per cent, and overseas, 17.5 per cent. The official 2009 numbers aren't available but Tourism Calgary estimates they're similar to the previous year.
Williams said Tourism Calgary's strategic plan is the result of consultation and collaboration with the industry.
"It will define our whole marketing plan over the next few years in our strategies. Where we need to be. What our customer looks like," he said.
"The other thing is we know that our convention centre is undersized right now and there's a lot of talk of expanding the convention centre. Once that happens, there will be a need to fill that."
He said the U.S. market has been a challenge and visitations to Canada from south of the border have eroded each year since 2002. The economic downturn plus border, passport and security issues have had an impact in that market.
"We keep saying we've bottomed out on the American traffic to Canada each year and it hasn't been that way. We've seen long-haul U.S. visitation to Canada actually go up two per cent. So that was a positive signal in 2009 over 2008. We're hopeful the American market will come back," said Williams.
China is a great opportunity for the Calgary tourism industry, he said.
"We expect at the G8, G20 summits in Ontario this month that Canada will sign an Approved Destination Status agreement with China. Canada does not have that now. We'd be the 135th country in the world to get an ADS agreement," he said.
"We get about 150,000 (in Canada) and about 25,000 Chinese visitors to Calgary right now. Those are business travel group travellers and independent travellers and they have a hard time getting visas out of China without ADS. So we can't market in China without ADS. We can't do any billboards or mass marketing without ADS. So ADS gives us the ability to do leisure group tours and also to market in China. With those two abilities we believe that we can grow tourism from China to double over the next five years. That would represent the largest growth market percentage wise for Calgary than any other market."
Another area of potential growth is Japan. Air Canada's new direct flights between Calgary and Tokyo will help. "The tourism industry globally is very competitive. And one of the ways that you can overcome some of that competition is to have direct access," said Williams.
mtoneguzzi@theherald.canwest.com
Copyright (c) CW Media Inc.