The New Business

We are thrilled to share that the Canadian government just invested $200,000 into Whereabouts, the destination management software we developed with our sister company, Tourism Technology Co. Whereabouts was built for you — the people and organizations we're celebrating today, on World Tourism Day. After a year in beta with a small group of customers, we've seen firsthand how it nails what DMOs need to manage their destination. This funding will help us bring Whereabouts to more customers this winter. Stay tuned for more on how we’re stepping up where old-school CRMs like Simpleview and HubSpot fall short. Want to learn more? Sign up for our newsletter, Outbound, for updates on Whereabouts. We’ll be sharing regular news and insights. Let's make this year’s World Tourism Day the start of even more growth and connection in our industry. Our deepest thanks to The Seven—Northeastern Ontario Tourism, Ontario's Highlands Tourism Organization (RTO-11), and Destination Northern Ontario for joining us on this journey! We're grateful to the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario) for the support.

Our brilliant Senior Content Strategist Jennifer McCartney's book is a bestseller in New Dehli! Go check it out!

Did you know that we have employees from coast to coast? We're fully remote, and having people in New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia gives us some great perspective into our clients needs. We're always looking for our next team member - especially if you're in Newfoundland and/or Labrador, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Yukon, NWT, PEI, Nova Scotia or Nunavut!

If you haven’t heard, we recently launched a new product for DMO’s - Whereabouts - the operating system for destinations. Visit Prince Edward County is the first to launch this product and it’s operators are signing up in droves - helped by some pretty incredible memes. Check it out at www.tourism.tech, our sister company that developed this incredible tech.

Need a website for your destination, but don't need all the bells and whistles? Our site for Township of Huron-Kinloss's project "Secrets of the Back 40" is a perfect example of a nice, tight, small website with impeccably executed content and product design (thanks BC Hughes!) and can be built to your specifications.

This is an excellent primer on the age of SEO-first. Businesses have forgotten about customers, and built websites for Google. This is not how it's supposed to be. While search optimization is important, our most successful clients find the best online customer interactions come from prioritizing the customer in everything they do - not algorithms.

The new homepage of Destination Northern Ontario's website is looking great! The North is a great place to visit if you're looking to really enjoy your winter.

The Operating System for the tourism industry. What a novel concept!

Love how simple and straighforward, yet immersive this page from Yukon Travel is.

FOR DESTINATIONS ONLY; It's getting to be that time of year - wrapping up the current fiscal and making budgets for the next one. If you're looking for inspiration for the next big thing for your destination marketing, here's a couple of ideas: 1. Rebuild your tourism database in Tourism Technology Co.'s brand-new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool - Whereabouts. It does all the heavy lifting (i.e. scraping the internet for changed to customer information, rather than depending on manual edits) AND it give all your operators a score on their Digital Health. Is their website up to date? Mobile friendly? Are they posting regularly to social media? Are they responding to reviews? 2. Content Campaigns; despite the rise of AI, we firmly believe that travel advice should be written by humans. Hire us to work with local authors on topics that are important to your destination, and optimize for search. $24k gets you 12 stories AND we take care of the paid promotion, targeting the audience relevant to each piece. Much more effective than massive awareness campaigns. 3. Trip planning resources. Got a great route and stops, but it looks flat on your website? For $1500 we can build it out in Tripper (or 10 for $10k), our cutting-edge trip planning app that puts destinations first. Open up this article, and click on one of the destination cities to see it in action: https://lnkd.in/gJgdK9hp 4. Photo and video asset collection - you can never have too much, and with the focus on social video, you likely need new assets that are taken in a more casual style AND in portrait orientation. $50k and we'll come to your region and shoot photo and video of up to 50 businesses or attractions. 5. Website Rebuilds - you hate your website. It's slow, it's old, it doesn't work on mobile, users aren't using it they way you thought they would. We excel at this work. Build a microsite for $10k, a full-featured site for $50k, or the site of your dreams for $100k. 6. E-Commerce - as you likely know, our sister company Tourism Technology Co. has been hard at work on Booker, and we're introducing some new features this year to allow for better reporting on the ROI of your e-commerce initiatives, and including the ability to provide inventory for businesses that don't use our software. It's a win-win-win! Book a call with our CEO Michael Jacobs today and let's make some waves! #tourismmarketing