The City of Nanaimo has awarded a five-year service contract to Tourism Vancouver Island.
The agreement will run from this April to the end of March 2024 and it’s for both tourism marketing and visitor servicing at the service centres.
Tourism Vancouver Island has been operating the services on a year to year contract basis for the past two years and president and CEO, Anthony Everett says the longer contract will allow for some longer-term planning to take place.
“The RFP that we responded to was quite detailed. It was about a hundred pages long and it’s really the basis for what we are going to do over the next five years. We will have a five-year strategy that we are going to get busy working on, but really the RFP is the foundation of that and then we just do an annual business plan like any business would do.”
“Now that we know the visitor services strategy, we run the visitors service centres, we can look at some of the things that are happening in that world in terms of digital technology and engaging visitors. But really it’s building on the innovative digital content marketing that we’ve been already working on and start looking at programs that can last multiple years, whether it’s cuisine tourism or things like that.”
The city is paying 650,000 dollars annually for the contract.
