2006 News

Resort on the Rebound!
Sept 7-11, 2006 (Whistler Question)
Story by Jennifer Miller(jmiller@whistlerquestion.com)

Five years after 9/11, officials say they’ve learned complacency doesn’t cut it in the face of continuing challenges.

The five years that have passed since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have been some of the most challenging years for Whistler as a resort, but tourism officials say they have also been a big learning experience — and after many difficult lessons, Whistler is now starting to see growth for the first time in several years.

In fact, though August numbers are not yet available, summer 2006 is on track to be the busiest in the resort’s history, said Barrett Fisher, president of Tourism Whistler (TW). Room nights were up by 27 per cent over last year in July alone, she said.

But early indications of a turnaround are only part of the bigger picture. With continued worldwide threats of terrorism, mandatory passports pending for travel to and from the U.S., fierce competition from other resorts, and a continuing slump in visitors from long-haul U.S. markets, officials also recognize that Whistler has to keep up the aggressive marketing and promotion work that has begun to take the resort down the road back to being a top destination for travelers.

Though the events of Sept. 11 and their aftermath certainly had an impact on tourism, Whistler was already starting to see the end of its glory days of staggering growth by the time the U.S. was attacked, said Stuart Rempel, Whistler Blackcomb’s senior vice president of sales and marketing.
After a decade or so of unprecedented growth, construction was starting to slow down and fewer new properties meant less advertising for Whistler, he said.

“Nine-eleven started to exacerbate the problem in a big hurry,” he said.
However, it took some time for the impact of the terrorist attacks to hit tourism levels to Whistler. The 2001-’02 winter season was actually the best winter to date in Whistler’s history in terms of on-mountain visits, Rempel said.

There was some immediate decline in visitors from the U.S. and a general sense that they wanted to stay closer to home. But people were also looking for “safe” travel options and a sense of escape, both of which the mountains provided, he said.

Still, Sept. 11 wasn’t an isolated event and other regional and global challenges followed that had a significant impact on travel to the resort. The war in Iraq, a weakening U.S. economy and currency, U.S. airlines cutting back flights and facing bankruptcy, increased border security, skyrocketing gas prices and SARS were all factors in the decline, Fisher said.
Add regional issues such as flooding in the Sea to Sky region and poor snowfall levels, and after the boom of the ’90s, Whistler seemed to be going bust.

“The only thing we weren’t hit by was locusts,” she said, but was quick to add that there was B.C.’s pine beetle infestation.
For the first time, Whistler was faced with the challenge of having to solicit business instead of just merely being the “order takers” during the growth period of the ’90s, Fisher said.

“Whistler started to fight back,” she said.

A few years ago, tourism officials began to regroup and strategize — ultimately creating a few key initiatives that have been producing results. More money than ever has been put into marketing campaigns — TW’s advertising budget has more than doubled over the past two years, Fisher said.

In addition to selling the “dream” of Whistler as a brand and promoting the kinds of experiences travellers will find here, there has also been a concerted effort to show potential visitors that Whistler offers good value for their travel dollars, Rempel said. Value vacation packages were developed and people started to buy them, he said. Advertising was also focused on the regional markets — Washington state, Oregon, B.C. and Alberta — which, it was felt, would return better results than the long-haul U.S. markets, Fisher said. While regional visitors on average tend to spend less than long-haul guests while in Whistler, this strategy produced growth last winter where none might have been seen without the focus on the regional traveler.
Overall room nights were up by five per cent last winter over the previous year, she said.

“The regional market is critical to Whistler’s success,” Fisher said. “It’s important for us not to get too out of touch with that.”

At the same time, officials have also learned it’s important to focus on nurturing a variety of markets to keep numbers growing from some areas of the world while fewer visitors arrive from other areas because of local political and economic forces, she said.

Another success for the resort has been significant growth in the group business sector since last fall, with Conference Centre bookings and group hotel reservations reaching record levels, Fisher said.
The challenges of the past five years have caused Whistler to mature as a resort, and a sign of that maturity is the recognition that despite recent successes, officials here cannot afford to sit back and expect the growth to continue.

“Sept. 11 probably kicked off a chain reaction of external challenges, but we have to recognize that those external challenges will continue to come and go,” Fisher said. “If we have created a strong brand and we are aggressive in how we promote it, we will bounce back from those external challenges a lot quicker.”

The U.S. government decision to make passports mandatory for air and sea travellers effective Jan. 8, 2007, is just one of the major issues facing the tourism sector that officials cannot afford to ignore.

“We’ve seen the bottom of the business and I think if we continue to keep the pressure on… at the end of the day we’re going to be quite successful,” Rempel said. “(But) optimism can’t mean complacency. We all have to be really sharp and on our game.”