Partnership Strategies: Buddy Up
Buddy up with a partnership strategy, it's good for business.
It was shaping up to be the best of times. Late last year the snow was deep and crisp and even and Doug Washer’s 60-sled snowmobile business was firing on all cylinders. “It looked like we were on track to have our best January in years,” recalls the owner of Canadian Snowmobile Adventures.
Then, halfway through January, the Pineapple Express arrived, a warm and wet low-pressure system sweeping in off the Pacific. The rain fell, and fell, and fell. “At first we weren’t too worried,” says Washer. “This is Whistler and it always snows at Whistler.”
But the rains kept coming, the snow kept melting and after a week the trails resembled creeks.
Washer and his crew were soon spending as much time in the woods doing damage control, diverting water so it didn’t wash away the trails, as they were running tours. By the end of January business was down by 60 per cent and Washer was reduced
to ferrying clients up to the rapidly vanishing snowpack in Hummers and ATVs.
Between tours and trail grooming he scurried about town circulating notices to keep the hotels and ticket agents up to date on the changing nature of the business.
By the first week of February the white flag was flying. The snowmobiles were idle. Now what? “We’d always had heli-touring in the back of our minds,” says Washer. “But there’d always been so much snow we’d never really given it much thought.” He called his buddy Steve Flynn of Blackcomb Helicopters and the two of them ‘long-lined’ a couple of snowmobiles underneath one of Flynn’s Astars and choppered off in search of opportunity, the sleds swinging over the village like pendulums in a grandfather clock.
Flynn’s business wasn’t suffering. The lack of snow meant two things: more work moving snow guns around as the ski hills struggled to manufacture the white stuff nature wasn’t providing; and more work evacuating medical cases. (Sad but true; less snow means more obstacles, which means more injuries as skiers and obstacles make contact.) But gazing down on that reconnaissance flight they discovered that the snow on Sproat Mountain was still in perfect shape. Bonus: the route they used to get there, much of it over terrain set aside for the 2010 Olympics, was a scene-merchant’s dream. So they flew 16 machines up to the alpine and left them there, and then Washer papered Whistler with a new sheaf of flyers promoting his latest product, heli-snowmobiling.
The phones rang off the hook. It was a more expensive product to be sure, but the clients loved it and willingly absorbed the price increase of $120. (The new fare was calculated by adding the per-minute rate Flynn charged for the helicopters.) “It turned out to be the ultimate bragging-rights thing to do,” says Washer.
Today’s travellers are more sophisticated than ever. They’ve been there and looked at that and taken home all the T-shirts they need. Now they want to go somewhere and do something special. As Tourism Vancouver VP Stephen Pearce explains, “Tourism is all about experiences nowadays,” he says. “A destination has to be like a diamond, it has to have different facets. The more experiences the destination can provide, the broader the appeal.”
It’s difficult for one business to be all things to all travellers. You’re either a river rafting company or a golf course, a health spa or a mountain bike park. What’s more, travellers come in all shapes, sizes, ages, fitness levels and both sexes. What’s appropriate for a retired couple in their 70s is not going to appeal to their teenage grandchildren. Husbands and wives may want to do the same thing together one day and completely separate stuff the next.
Satisfying all these needs is not impossible when a variety of entrepreneurs offering different products and experiences band together. Complimentary businesses team up but competitors, too, are recognizing the benefits. As SFU marketing professor Lindsay Meredith observes, “You get an awful lot bigger bang when you’ve got a whole bunch of guys yelling bang together.”
It may seem counterintuitive to view the golf course across the street from your own course as an ally but in the destination marketing business, he’s your best friend. “A serious golfer isn’t going to travel all the way to Whistler or the Okanagan to play one golf course,” Meredith says, “but they’ll come to play five or 10.” And while they’re in town playing golf they’re also staying in a hotel and eating in restaurants and, for a change of pace, going on a river-rafting adventure, which of course makes the hotels, restaurants and river rafters allies as well.
Soon the exponential power of marketing kicks in. When five golf courses get together they discover that their marketing dollars suddenly travel five times further. When they add five hotels to the mix, their original power of five is multiplied by the reach of the hotels and all the partners the hotels have, and so on. With enough critical mass, you can create something like Tourism Whistler, which takes money from all the players and uses it to promote them around the world.
Tourism Whistler, previously the Whistler Resort Association, was the first legislated resort association in Canada with taxation or assessment power. Members include property owners and businesses in Whistler and Blackcomb villages, as well as those in the Whistler Gondola area. According to communications manager Breton Murphy, the amount each member pays is based on a complicated formula that takes into account where your property is located, revenues, number of accommodation units, whether you’re strata or non, and square footage. These membership assessments provide Tourism Whistler with its income – some $7 million in 2004.
There are other revenue streams in place, too. TW operates a central reservations system, charging a commission for its services; it netted $136,000 last year. It also runs the Whistler Golf Club, which earned $800,000 after expenses, and the Telus Whistler Conference Centre. All this revenue allowed Tourism Whistler to spend upwards of $5.5 million in marketing and sales in 2004 – this in addition to the money the individual players spent on promoting themselves.
Whistler Blackcomb, the division of Intrawest in charge of the ski hills, declined to tell us what it spends yearly on marketing and special events; PR manager Christina Moore would only say that it’s a “significant” amount of money. However, a 2001 report prepared by NGR Resort Consultants estimated that the company spent a whopping $4 million in 2000 to push its lift tickets and other products. Needless to say, Tourism Whistler and its major players meet regularly to ensure they don’t duplicate efforts.
Attracting partners was a cornerstone of the Wickaninnish Inn’s business plan from the start, says managing director Charles McDiarmid. “We want to specialize in what we do, which is accommodation, but since we also wanted to be able to offer the best of what Long Beach has to offer, we decided to attract partners who could help us create a destination experience.”
One of the Wick’s partners is Sonic Blue, previously North Vancouver Air, which used to fly between Vancouver and Tofino on the weekends, and only in the summer. Back in 1996, when the hotel opened, McDiarmid approached the carrier and made the owners an offer: provide scheduled flights year-round between Vancouver and Tofino and the Wick will refer all its customers to you. The airline took the bait and “that support provided the momentum for three regularly scheduled flights a week,” says Sonic Blue GM Arthur Harrison, who took over the company two years ago. Reliable air access to Tofino prompted other area resorts to steer their clients toward the airline. The combined business doubled Sonic Blue’s passengers and generated enough revenue for the airline to offer daily service and fund the purchase of a second nine-passenger aircraft.
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