Will tours from your couch save the industry?
Tourism has been hit particularly hard and, as we head into summer, some operators bet on virtual offerings to soften blow
At this time of year in years past, Japanese tourists would begin to pour into this country’s smallest province, moths to the flame of Canada’s most famous redhead.
They’re drawn to P.E.I.’s northern shore, to the small town of Cavendish, where sits the legendary Green Gables; to soak up the house, the Lovers’ Lane, the Haunted Woods — the ostensible stomping grounds of the island province’s most famous export, one Anne Shirley.
There is no real Anne Shirley, of course — with an “e” or otherwise. There is no real Green Gables and there is no Avonlea. They’re all part of the idyllic rural world of the Anne of Green Gables books created in the early 1900s by author Lucy Maud Montgomery.
That’s never stopped the tourists though. Every year, by the thousands they come, a pilgrimage ignited by the first Japanese translations of the books in the postwar 1950s — which thereupon entered schools’ curriculums — then stoked and fanned by a Japanese animated series in the ’70s, a movie in the ’80s and the periodic cinematic revisits since then.
Katsue Masuda, the operations manager for PEI Select Tours, which caters exclusively to Japanese tourists, has been helping those visitors see the sights here for 20 years now. But that was before the coronavirus.
Nowadays, when she runs a tour at the iconic Anne of Green Gables house, there’s an iPhone in front of her rather than a gaggle of tourists in back.
In pre-pandemic times, the company would host somewhere in the neighbourhood of 6,000 tourists per season, taking their Japanese clients through the Gables, to locations mentioned in the famous books and later, to Montgomery’s birthplace and gravesite.
That’s all gone now, in a world where COVID has almost eliminated international tourism, and tour operators across the country are being forced to adapt to different ways of engaging their prospective clients until they can travel again.
That’s what Masuda is doing … adapting. And that’s why, like her, many of the country’s tour operators are turning to some form of virtual tourism.
Destination Canada, a government umbrella organization for tourism, produced a report in March 2021 on Canadian tourism a year into the pandemic. It contains some sobering conclusions, including that the 2020 losses to the tourism sector are the worst on record: Canada, says the report, is estimated to have lost $15.7 billion in international travel revenues due to COVID-19.
PEI Select Tours ran its last in-person tour in February 2020. But in May, Masuda began to put together a virtual tour, a sort of webinar using photos and video that she’d taken over the years.
By October, that had evolved into a live tour.
“My advantage is that I’m living here, so I can do a ‘Live from Green Gables,’ ” she says.
A typical tour will start with 15 to 20 tourists logging into a Zoom call hosted by Masuda on her iPhone. She’ll show them a slide show and then a video clip of the drive to Green Gables. And then she’ll walk them — via iPhone — around the visitor centre at the Gables.
From there it’s a walk out the door and over to the Green Gables house, which she’ll explore with her virtual visitors
inside and out, telling them stories, taking questions and conversing.
She says her clientele is a mixture of people who have already been to P.E.I. and some who dream of doing so. For those who have been, it’s Masuda’s intimate knowledge of the Green Gables world that brings them to her virtual tours.
“They’ll say, ‘Oh! I went there, but I didn’t notice this part,’ or ‘The guide didn’t explain that part.’ And some people have never been here; their dream is to come here, but they can’t. And those people, I guess we’re feeding their interest to come to P.E.I. in person, physically,” Masuda says.
Kelly Doyle is the owner of PEI Select Tours. He began the company with Masuda 20 years ago and he’s dedicated to serving the niche market of Japanese tourists. That means Japanese-speaking guides and Japanese-speaking interpreters, and it also means that, with his international clientele severely dented, it’s much more difficult — nearly impossible — to pivot to a domestic clientele.
That being said, while the virtual tours seem to be garnering positive responses, he sees them mostly as a stopgap measure to maintain interest until the pandemic passes. When that happens, they’ll likely rededicate themselves fully to inperson tours.
“If everything was back to normal and there was no pandemic, this would be like replacing my guides in the van with a tape, you know? It just wouldn’t be the same thing,” he says.
“As far as the wintertime, between November and May, we may continue doing them and certainly for events like Easter or Christmas, but I don’t think it’ll become a major part of our business.”
For other tourism operators across the country, those without such a niche market, different decisions on virtual tourism will be made. What’s certain is that they’re all in the same leaky boat and all trying to find ways to stay afloat until the pandemic passes.
“Tourism in Canada was first hit, hardest hit and will be the last to recover,” reads Destination Canada’s report on tourism in 2020. “The state of the visitor economy is more dire than the impacts following 9/11, the SARS outbreak and the 2008 economic crisis combined.”
Post Sept. 11, the report says it took more than 10 years for the sector to return to normal.
More and more, tour operators are turning to virtual tourism to try to shorten that recovery time.
In Alberta, Banff & Lake Louise Tourism offers up webcam views of some of their most picturesque scenery and interactive 360-degree tours of canyons, trails and, of course Lake Louise, in ultra-rich 4K video.
In Niagara Falls, you can take a 360-degree video trip under the Falls, without getting a drop on you.
Bird Kingdom in Niagara Falls, for the most part, hosts class trips from Ontario schools
Canada is estimated to have lost $15.7 billion in international travel revenues due to the pandemic
within bus range. When the lockdowns came last March, they realized they would lose at least one education season of in-person trips, if not two, says Bird Kingdom’s Steve Bush.
They spent six months putting together a virtual tour that combined live interaction, question-and-answer sessions with staff and a pre-recorded tour of the world’s largest indoor free-flying aviary — which, it turns out, has its bonuses: perfect angles and perfect behaviours of the birds on every single tour.
But then they discovered another bonus. While the virtual tours don’t replace the lost revenue of in-person visits, they do allow Bird Kingdom to extend its range. A few days ago, they did a virtual tour for a group from B.C. Later, this month they’ll virtually host a group from the U.S.
“It’s going to be part of our education program for the foreseeable future,” he says. “We’re finding that we’re connected with people from our local area, but also reaching an entirely new group of visitors that ordinarily couldn’t reach us.”
But while the virtual tours have their benefits, to the point that some outfits now see them as part of their future offerings, they are still no match for the real experience, says Kim Logan of Banff & Lake Louise Tourism.
Although their webcam pages are their most visited sites, they really are just a taste of the real thing.
“Beautiful visuals are one thing, but I think to truly have a fulsome experience of something I think you really need all of your senses,” she says. “I think you really have to be there, you need to feel, you need to see with your own eyes, you need to smell, to really engage everything and really be in the moment.
“Banff National Park is an incredibly majestic place, but I don’t think anything can really replace being here and experiencing it with your own eyes.”