Tourism Champions, Brad Kozak & Trevor Norris are Reimagining Ontario's Travel Experiences

Mary Anne Ivison (Voiceover)  0:01  
This is forward motion discussions about the important topic shaping Ontario's tourism industry. Here's your host, Andrew sigwart,

Andrew Siegwart  0:09  
we have an exciting two part episode today celebrating two recipients of our 2025 tourism champion of the Year Award, Brad Kozak and Trevor Norris. Brad is a driving force behind golf in Ontario, an innovative agency that connects golfers with amazing experiences across Ontario. Brad has built booking infrastructure, packaging and a marketing strategy that now connects over 50 golf courses, 25 accommodation partners and nine tourism regions. Trevor, Senior Manager of destination development for the Bay of Quinte Regional Marketing Board is reshaping how rural tourism works in Ontario by stimulating and championing innovative and regenerative local experiences, he is successfully positioning the region as a leader for values based sustainable tourism development, whether you play in the golf space craft immersive visitor experiences lead a regional destination marketing organization or work to help entrepreneurs build travel products. This two part episode delivers real world insight, inspiration and some great ideas. Well, hello, Brad, congratulations on being named one of our tourism champions of the

Brad Kozak  1:16  
year. Thank you. Yeah, it's um, it's an exciting time. I we've been working hard on this program for, you know, eight plus years, and it's really great to see it kind of come to fruition and be able to kind of show off, you know, golf travel a little bit.

Andrew Siegwart  1:30  
What was your aha moment when you saw the potential to elevate golf tourism in Ontario, you know, not just as a local pastime and a sport that that people enjoy, but as something that can really drive destinations and increase performance. I've

Brad Kozak  1:42  
worked with a few different destinations, kind of all over North America over the last kind of 10 plus years. And the interesting thing about golf and travel is that it's trackable, and it produces an ROI. And I think in our program, everybody was spending like, if you take all of our tourism partners, everybody was spending some type of money on golf, and whether that was going to a trade show or promoting their local courses or doing a video shoot, everybody had some type of, I don't know, they were buying into to what Golf was. What our program did was bring all of that together, provide a marketing arm, provide a kind of a community of people that are interested in golf travel, and then we're able to then provide a trackable number to people for your X dollars turned into X ROI. So I think when everybody was kind of coming together, and everyone was a little bit discombobulated with, you know, all the things they were spending money on, and somebody saw value in this, and somebody saw value somebody saw value in this, and we were getting sold on this magazine or this, this website, and blah, blah, blah, I think they basically just brought everything together, put everything into a pod, and was able to, you know, provide something that hasn't really been done, and create that

Andrew Siegwart  2:59  
ROI for people. And I think the differentiator is and correct me if I'm wrong. But a lot of the the different operations were marketing themselves, but what you brought to the table was a way to not only market, but also to book tea times and book packages and actually transact. So it's, it's, it's, it's a marketing funnel, but it's ultimately driving transactions in one place. Yeah,

Brad Kozak  3:21  
it's a sales role. Like, it's a sales program. The first thing that I say is, like, you know, the goal is to get a sale. The goal is to get a lead. If it doesn't create a lead, then we're not doing our job. So that's kind of what we look at every single second of every day, is, how do we get more leads? How do we convert those leads? How do we develop new product, that's great, that's high quality, that'll that'll provide good reviews. Yeah, we put all of that together,

Andrew Siegwart  3:46  
you know, from your take across the industry, what, what were some of the gaps like? Was it that golf was waning in popularity? Was it that different properties needed to fill different times of the year? Like, what was the sort of, you know, the reason for it all

Brad Kozak  4:01  
pre covid. I think the amount of there's 800 plus golf courses in the province of Ontario. So that the product is, is that there's anything from Mom and Pop, pitch and putts to, you know, big time venues that host, you know, national championships and professional tournaments. So there's a very wide range of product. I think when we first kind of started, it was Chuck Tebow, who's kind of been the champion of this. From the beginning. Chuck looks at it and goes, Okay, we have x amount of golf courses in our region. Same with Bruce K SIMCO and they were part of the program. Same with Doug over and bay of Quinte. They look at it as we have X amount of shareholders in this kind of vertical. How can we create something to help those that vertical, and whether you have 80 wineries or breweries or whatever that you know attractions, being able to kind of put that all together and figure it out, is an opportunity that that Chuck approached me with, and he said, Okay, we have access. To to partnership money through destination Ontario to attract people from outside of Ontario to come to Ontario. And that was kind of how everything came together. And he said, would you want to manage it? I said, Okay, well, yes the answer is yes. We'll figure out how to do that and bring on partners that see the value and see, you know, the tourism being a vertical of their their kind of business composition. So yeah, that was kind of the starting point, I guess, of everything,

Andrew Siegwart  5:25  
yeah, and really, and really saying to all of our customer segments, Golf is a huge attraction and a great experience. In Ontario, there's lots of choice. Let us help you find where you want to go and get your experience booked, which I think is fantastic. It starts to create new ways to talk about tourism. And I think it was brilliant. Tell me, how did you go from sort of concept to reality like, what were some of the early challenges in building buy in from some of the partners, golf courses, accommodation partners like this is a pretty ambitious project that you set out to achieve.

Brad Kozak  6:01  
The logistics are always the challenge. And again, you're working with so many different types of businesses where maybe you're a golf course and you do 320 events a year, so you don't look at the daily player as something that's an overly big part of your business. You're looking at getting corporate dollars to spend on. You know, they buy their 144 person shotgun. They pay for 144 players, 120 players show up. They do. 120 player like, 120 people eat. You know, the golf course is like, yeah, you renting out the golf course. You know, whether that's a golf course or any type of venue, it's the same kind of thing. It's just the golf is secondary on that side. So one of the biggest, I think, challenges, was access in advance, like knowing that people are booking these trips. You know whether, whether you're coming from Sarnia to go to Collingwood, or you're coming from the UK to go to Durham, like everybody was trying to plan things in advance, and I that's always been the challenge with golf in certain metropolitan areas and larger areas, is T sheets are busy, so you sit there and say, okay, average booking Windows between seven and 14 days. If you're trying to plan a trip to go anywhere, do do whatever. You're not just going to sit there and say, Okay, I'm just gonna book my stuff 10 to 14 days in advance. It'd be a nightmare. So our biggest thing is access. Our biggest thing when we pitch is access. It's not price. We try to get access to places earlier than what the public can get access to, so that we're able to plan things 9120 plus days in advance and make sure that everything's flawless when they get on their trip. That's the hardest part, and continues to be the hardest part. You know, 10 years, 10 years later

Andrew Siegwart  7:50  
for sure, yeah, because I would imagine all those operators, they have to have a good sense of their business to be able to let you know what capacity there is left to sell and then, and then get it to you in advance and so that you can sell it and promote it. But I would imagine that over time, as you starting to as you deliver those results, that probably helped get people to get you that information quicker, faster.

Brad Kozak  8:12  
Yeah, it's there's a lot of, you know, I call them funny stories, but there's a lot of good stories out there of people that were skeptical. And, you know, we've worked so closely with with bay of Quinte and Belleville over the last couple years, and they're, like, the most interesting success story we have, because it's a, you know, smaller place. They look at themselves as rural tourism, but you know, we're booking 700 and something rounds of golf at Black Bear ridge and sending them, you know, almost $500,000 worth of business over the last three or four years. So or four years. So there's a big stepping stone there. But once we get there, it's kind of the floodgates open, and they've changed their businesses to adapt to tourism instead of, you know, more local stuff or whatever else. And certainly tournaments have, you know, tournaments on Saturdays and certain markets have just gone away because they know that they can get a better rate from people paying, you know, full rack rate that are their visit so that's an interesting part of it.

Andrew Siegwart  9:10  
Yeah, yeah. And in a way, what it, what it's what you're doing is you're working with different operators and courses to to almost diversify their their customer base and to focus on higher yield.

Brad Kozak  9:23  
You say that word like, that's the biggest that's the biggest thing. So in my mind, you take your three prongs of business, you take your corporate events, you take your members, if you have a membership, and then whatever else that is, if tourism fits into that. And you have a group of 24 people that are coming there, and they're trying to play 90 days in advance, and they want to play between 930 and 1030 on a Saturday morning, that 920 4t time and 90 t t time. If those are still available, as we get a little bit closer, when the public's available, they should be paying more for that, because that's a more premium price point. And again, we're not asking for a discount that far in advance. We're happy to pay whatever rate. The golf course dictates we pay, but access to that only benefits them. It's not giving us the discount so that we can go out and make money. It's giving, like the group, access so that their T sheet becomes more they're just, they're growing, you know, the revenue each day. So that's kind of an interesting certain places don't do it like certain places, you know, if you look all over the US yield management and everything is is alive and well. But a lot of courses don't do that, still, just because it's a season, you know, they look at themselves as seasonal business or or the customers, like, Oh, I'm not going to pay. You know, today, my T times 119 tomorrow, my T times 126 the next to the MIT times 132, but anything that's a desirable time, whether it's a flight or or anything else like that, those go quickly, and you got to kind of hop on

Andrew Siegwart  10:48  
that, yeah, and the consumer understands that, right? That's where you you're incentivizing pre booking and getting more organized and stuff. So it's very smart. And I do think that that revenue management side we're definitely seeing, you know, I would say, very predominant in the accommodation space. But more attractions, more sector attraction sectors are are implementing this, I think, in Snow Resorts as an example, big movement there to really strong results, which is great. Obviously, in order to do this, you really need some good technology. What was that process like? What technology innovations have you had to bring to the table to make all this work?

Brad Kozak  11:27  
That process never stops. That's an ongoing kind of day to day thing. It's always trying to make you know, we look at user experiences very, very important. We brought someone into our office that's now kind of in charge of that. When you go to our website. How are we going to get somebody to enjoy getting a quote, as opposed to like, oh, I have to put in my info and and get info back. A lot of it's kind of a give and take in a trade. So the reason why we went, I think it was four years ago. We partnered with a company golf troop, and they have a very good kind of customized back end software to manage group bookings, manage payments, manage itineraries. They've developed it all from scratch, specifically around golf. So what we have is all of our inventory in our back end. We have rates that live in the back end. Our biggest thing is making sure that when people are shopping, they get the info they actually want to get, and they don't have to just wait on us to provide it. And it might not be exactly what they want. It might be some tweaks here, some tweaks there, but if someone's looking for two nights, three rounds of golf in a location, you know that's popular, we're going to provide them that at one o'clock in the morning if they want. If that's when they're they're kind of shopping. So our, that's our biggest thing was, let's get some ideas. Let's get some kind of marketable packages out there that people do book. So, you know, you take Belleville, London, Collingwood's always kind of like our three popular, most popular destinations, and then we'll switch those around. So, you know, each month we'll, you know, promote different ones. So it's a, it's now a marketable thing during busier season saying that, okay, tourism, Kingston is now getting, you know, May to June are quick quotes. And they're getting, regardless of people, book or not, there's still that kind of like, okay, like, I saw that quote. It was 759 in Kingston. It was 649 in Windsor, and it was, you know, 679 in Niagara. And then, you know, people can take it for what they want. We'll do our sales process and and try and get them across the finish line with us. But part of the reason why this has kind of jumped so much over the last few years is because, you know, we are a marketing arm too. We don't expect everybody to book through golf in Ontario. That's That's a outrageous thing to think, if we did think that the goal is to say these are packages that are available, that people can book, and they can customize, literally down to transportation to wine tours, to anything. So, yeah, that's that's kind of been the tech part enables us to do that and make it easy and manage some of this stuff. If you know, we're doing a lot of things manually for a long time, and it just, it's just hard, like it's hard to manage payments. You know, 10 bucks here, 20 bucks here, yeah, for sure, changes, changes everything.

Andrew Siegwart  14:07  
So what's, what's really brilliant, I think, is that you're, I mean, this is a, really a multi layered solution, because, on top, on top of working with your golf partners to help them really maximize their their inventory, so to speak, and to fill gaps and to fulfill a role that they need filling, to help them, you know, earning incremental dollars, you're also creating itineraries that are very guest focused, and then you're engaging other sectors, like wineries, like accommodations and others. So you're it's a guest focused approach, too. And I think that's probably the why is such a winning combo? Because a lot of a lot of marketing initiatives focus on what a business might need. You're making sure the customer is getting what they

Brad Kozak  14:47  
need. We're customer first, me and our team in our office. We're very unbiased when it comes to certain things, and so we try very hard to present the info that the group wants and push them into. Direction that they are comfortable going, as opposed to me saying, this is the package you need to do. This is the best price point. It's like, you know, people that want to go to Collingwood, and they're a group of 20 people, and they all want to be under one roof. Okay, we have an answer for that, but we don't necessarily have an answer for that. If they want to go to Windsor or they want everywhere, is different. So we really try and take that customer approach and say, This is what the customers are telling us. If they want a 10 bedroom chalet that's on a lake close to nightlife and drivable distance to five golf courses, you kind of laugh at them, because you're like, well, that doesn't exist. But we take that and say, this is close to what you want. And where have you gone in the past to kind of relay that because Ontario's different, Michigan's different, New York's different. Pei is different. Everywhere is different. And it's not just kind of one size fits all, and we do. We've made a conscious effort over the years to just kind of like consumer is the dictator of this. We're trying to get the consumer's credit card and we have to be able to put stuff together that answers the consumer, not what we think works. You

Andrew Siegwart  16:04  
raise a really good point about, you know, the data inputs that drive this, what are some of the most surprising or valuable insights you've seen from the data? Like, what stands out to you when you look at all this, like anything that has really surprised

Brad Kozak  16:18  
you? The biggest one. And it wasn't really a surprise, but it's the groups that are larger. Groups always have a group leader. So the group leader is in charge of, you know, anywhere from seven to 23 people's opinions of what they're going to be spending their money on. So the group leader is very important to us. The group size is very important to us. If we can make that group's leader leaders life 5% easier, that's a win, and all of a sudden they're going to start booking with us. You know, I've always kind of used this like the golf, travel, drug dealer type, like analogy, because it's, you're trying to be able to provide them something to make their life easier. So that's that's an interesting one. I think that as leads go up, you know, the expectation of our close rate or whatever, should go up as well. But that's not always true either. So if people are coming to us as a resource, you know, we're trying to be better on social. We're trying to be better on itinerary, providing and our package page. And you know, we were doing something this year that we haven't done, where we're kind of pinpointing what, you know, what we feel is the best fit for that particular package. So if it's great for ladies, or if it's great for couples, or if it's great for golf enthusiasts, like, it's important for us to communicate that. So we're just trying to kind of put everybody in a bucket, but making sure that our tiered approach of good, better, best is front of mind, so that if somebody wants a trip for 500 bucks, we can provide that. But if someone wants a trip for 1500 bucks, we can also provide that. If we, if we kind of look at just one one box, that's that's a tough one, because then you're always kind of going after one consumer, whereas I think for us, we have, you know, high end guys that go to Scotland every year, but they also go to they'll go to the pulpit club, or they'll go to TPC Toronto and and have that higher end experience. But there's also the guys that they're all piling into a rental chalet in Collingwood, and, you know, they're playing some of the more local courses, but they're having a great time. It's, they're different cost, it's just different

Andrew Siegwart  18:21  
customer. And I guess that one of the pieces that's so great about a platform and a business model like this is when you're working with so many different communities and courses, you're going to get a bigger world view of golf than even any one local place would, because you're seeing how it all, you know, maps out to different communities. So it is definitely valuable. Tell me the golf audience? Well, I'm going to ask you, has, how has the golf audience changed over the last, say, five to 10 years? Like, we know, there's some traditional golfers, but there's a lot of new segments. So you know, who's exploring golf right now and which segments are really growing?

Brad Kozak  18:57  
Everyone. Which is good, which is good, it's, you know, we're getting, we're getting the younger groups of guys that may have two or three avid golfers in their group, and then they have five guys that maybe picked up golf, you know, three or four years ago. It's the same with ladies trips. We have ladies that are members at private clubs, and maybe they don't want to get on an airplane and go somewhere. We're getting a lot of more couples trips that, you know, they rent a house and they want to make sure that they have a king bed in each room, or they're, you know, they want a hotel that's walkable to this or walkable to that. So it's, it's a lot of, again, covid kind of saved golf, you know, from a perspective of just general interest. And I think that now there's just a lot of buckets to go through and making sure that you know, this person that's particular on their trip gets the service that they need. This person that maybe isn't as particular on their trip, they get the same service. It's not like you're picking and choosing. You know which one to service and which one to not so, yeah, I think it's like a bucket thing. There's just a lot of different kinds. Consumers now across everything and golf, golf is no different.

Andrew Siegwart  20:03  
Would you say in your experience that golf operators, have they been, have they needed any supports to kind of meet those expanding markets and needs, or have they been pretty

Brad Kozak  20:15  
Yeah, like, I think if every golf course had two or three more employees in their offices, like they'd be better off. But I think that any tourism based business could probably say the exact same thing. Everybody wears so many different hats. The director of golf, like, there's places we work with that have a dedicated person that works with us. But then there's also, we're still emailing general managers who, you know, book 10 rounds a year or 12 rounds a year from some of our partner courses. So there's always the help that's needed. I think that anything that has a seasonal business to it, what do you do in the winter? Like it's, you can't just keep staff on and hope for the best. And, you know, as costs for everything go up, costs for gas, costs for lawn mowers, costs for food, costs for everything go up. Then that's, you know, it's harder for the golf course to maneuver that so, yeah, I think along the way, I think we always looked at ourselves as like an arm to help, not something to create more work. So like, when somebody calls us and they want four different golf courses, and they want this and they want that, having that one point of contact helps get them across the finish line, as opposed to them. Okay, we booked this tee time at Trillium wood in Belleville, but, you know, only 1130 is available on Friday. Oh, it's not available on Saturday. So then that person has to then do all that. We do all that for them. So like, if it's not us taking that call, it's the golf course taking that call, it's someone at the front desk that, you know, maybe new, that doesn't necessarily know that there's two or three golf courses down the street,

Andrew Siegwart  21:42  
and that's the value add, isn't it? Totally it's let us take care of that for you, especially because of the resource constraints that that every tourism operator is experiencing. Yeah, no question. Have you seen? You know, in a lot of different attractions or Experiential tourism, you're seeing operations move away from what's traditional and add new things to the mix, whether it's live music, whether it's different cultural experiences. Are you seeing golf courses play in that space? Is there anything interesting you're seeing

Brad Kozak  22:12  
there? Yeah, I think like, F and B is always an interesting one. Like you just get different types of operations, whether or not the golf course owns the FnB operation. Sometimes it's a third party the F and B components. Always, if you have a good restaurant on property, you're always going to have that restaurant full, because you have that easy access right after you're around the golf or before you're on the golf. I think the F and B stuff's interesting. You see a lot more events like Trillium wood hosts a really cool event there. That's a world long drive competition that they partner with World long drive athletes. You know, they sell pro AMS, and then at the end, they'll do a huge concert and everything at night. So I think that people trying to get people onto properties is, is happening a lot more. But again, it just comes down to the operator and kind of what that looks like. And, you know, if they have the bandwidth to even manage stuff like that. You know, our goal has always been to, how do we get golfers to stay on property longer and spend more money at that property? You know, this year we did a really cool program with destination Ontario that was exit surveys for all of our group leaders. So what we did was dive into what people were spending, and we asked some questions on like, what were you spending on transportation? And you know, transportation cost in Collingwood is very different than the transportation cost in in Belleville or Kingston or any of these other places. So, you know, we get some data on what people are willing to spend on a bus, or what are they willing to spend on getting place to place. And same thing with their everyday spend of getting to the golf course. What are they buying like? We found that average people were spending $65 in their pro shop. So you can assume that people are spending money on golf balls, hats or shirts like those are the three things that you know, if you have something else in there, there's certain pro shops that are better than others. Certain pro shops carry different product than others, but all the ones that are good retailers, like they could tell you that all the travelers are always buying swag from their from their pro shop. So that's always one that we try and push forward to, is like this person's there to give you their credit card, like they're not playing golf in four hours and leaving like they want to hang out. If you have a place that can provide that to them, they will hang out and spend that money

Andrew Siegwart  24:19  
with you, yeah, yeah, it's an opportunity, isn't it, totally and it's great to get that kind of data. Would you say that is transportation, cost, availability, one of the biggest barriers, or one of the biggest pain points?

Brad Kozak  24:32  
The hardest thing for us is, I, like, I'll fight this tooth and nail and say our job is to sell golf trips. So the if anything, deters somebody from booking that golf trip. It's hard for us to continue to push it. Transportation costs are going up, and everybody's expectations of transportation are going up. So, you know, we have a lot of each of our markets. We have a really good local company that understands the golfer that it's like a glorified Uber. They don't need to. It's not like a wedding where they're going stop the stop and taking pictures here and stopping here. And they're, they're basically picking up their group of eight to 24 people, driving them to the golf course. You know, they stay there five to seven hours. They're picking them up and bringing them back. And, yeah, transportation has been an interesting one, because it is. We're looking next year to add in more kind of baked in pricing with transportation, just to make it easy, right? Like, it's Belleville has always been a big one, because they don't have Uber. So if you don't have, if you don't have Uber, and Collingwood was like this, probably when you were up there too, like it was hard to find ways to get around after a certain time, and it's more of just ease. So we're trying to bake that into different, you know, different group sizes. You know, after we learn about this group, what they like to do, making it easier on them, but that cost is so high, like, you're looking sometimes you're 50 to $100 a person a day, like, sometimes certain groups are paying more for transportation than they are for golf. And that's kind of like one of those things. It's like, I get that part like, but it is that's, that's where, like, the give and take part is and and making sure that we're providing the service, and the consumer can make the choice whether or not they want to do it. But that is a big one in Ontario

Andrew Siegwart  26:11  
well, and you're making it easier. It's interesting because, you know, one of the one of our strategic objectives that came forward from the Ontario's New tourism strategy was that, you know, transportation from point from point of arrival to destination is important, but that last kilometer service of transportation went in market is just as important. So we're got a lot of work to do on that front. And one of the things we're looking at is to try to find partners who can, who can help us map that out totally.

Brad Kozak  26:42  
And it's funny, like, the best calls we get are the ones like, they come from a small business owner who has like, four or five limos or something, you know, like, we got one from London this year, and they call and they're like, Hey, we we booked a golf group that said they booked with you, you know, can we partner on something for next year? And so now we just bake, you know, if you're a group that's interested in this, here's the flat rate based on, you know, you going from your hotel to golf course, and make it super easy. Here's the contact person. We have a form that we fill out make it super easy. So, yeah, that's kind of the next level of our businesses. The other stuff, you know, working with all the tourism folks. The tourism folks want us to provide everything, and sometimes it isn't overly feasible to do that, but if we can kind of pick the things that are important to our market segment, you know, FnB, you know, breweries, wineries, transportation, and add those in, then you know, it's just additional spend that makes the

Andrew Siegwart  27:38  
overall numbers look better. And again, you're paying attention to what your core customer wants and making it seamless. And that's the name of the game. Looking ahead, you know, like you said, about eight years or so, big momentum, growth. What keeps you awake at night when you think about the future? What are you most trying to be prepared for?

Brad Kozak  27:56  
It's always kind of waving our tourism flag. And it's kind of, we're a conduit between you know, local operator and tourism folks. Tourism folks are the best in the business. Their their job is to kind of promote each area, but it's a lot of work in, you know, looking at different different areas and different different places. You know, golf courses, not seeing the value in travel is a tough one. That's always that's a answer we get all the time, and it's, it's more of like, No, we don't really want to give up access to our tee sheet that far in advance. Or, you know, one that we get pretty regularly, which makes me bang my head against the wall, is, well, those tee times are going to get booked anyways. So why would we give you access that far in advance? And that's a really hard one to hear, because then that, to me, they don't look at their golf courses like a destination type place, like it's very much a transactional week by week business. And that, that one's hard, you know, hard to hear. The biggest one is like places trying to do it themselves. So you get golf courses that, you know, that they do a good job of, of filling their houses, and they might have proper accommodations on site, but then kind of reaching out and creating more competition in the market where we don't necessarily, we could be more collaborative. I think that's one that's just as a, you know, third party tourism Booker, that's always one that if people can go direct and get a better price, then why wouldn't they just go direct? I guess that's kind of something that that we talk about in our business pretty regularly. But yeah, I think the honest truth is, I do think this is kind of at its infancy stage, like we look at what the market cap could be on the amount of people that inquire, and like last year, we had over 2500 group requests. So, you know, we book about 300 trips. We book about 300 trips a year. So what are those? You know, 2100 other groups doing. They're obviously still traveling. They're obviously still doing something. So that that's the interesting part is, like, Where can we get to? Because our like, we start tracking all of our revenue that doesn't get booked, which is always an interesting number, because if you know if we're producing. You know, 2 million or more in actual bookings, probably at like, five or 6 million in people that never booked. And so all of a sudden you're like, Okay, our, you know, little tourism program ends up being a pretty big economic impact in most places. So that's the interesting part. Is just capturing more data, like, what? What's the next data thing that I can provide, you know, to somebody who's, you know, sitting in their board meetings with their local MPs and partners and and shareholders and talking about, you know, where they're spending their money, like, how can we add data points that that make the needle move for them? It's

Andrew Siegwart  30:33  
interesting to me, because if I, if I rewind thinking pre pandemic, I remember having conversations with different golf operations, where they were worried they were worried about capacity, they were worried about maybe dialing back to nine holes and a whole bunch of changes. And it sounds like what you're sharing with us is that there's all this unmet demand. Because there's more customers than capacity, there's a potential for more. So I think it makes us think about what's the Investment Attraction potential in other in other markets, or what other attraction, like experiences, could fit into the golfer mindset that you might be able to bolt on or partner with, right? You know, it leads me to a question, which is, there's many other sectoral organizations across Ontario, and I would imagine if some of them are listening to this interview, they might think, gee, we could maybe create a similar type of approach, whether it is to drive more visits to wineries, drive more visits to culinary experiences, or whatever you know, what advice would you have for different sectors who would might want to leverage this type of strategy?

Brad Kozak  31:39  
Ultimately, as consumers, we're always trying to find the next cool thing, like the next thing that maybe no one knows about, or the next thing that's unique, or the next experience we want. I think that the collaborative approach that we have with kind of like an unbiased approach to it, has been the most interesting, because when we get tourism London in a room, and tourism Kingston in a room, and bay of Quinte and all these other places and all these shareholders together, it's interesting to see that they don't necessarily care about the people that are going to London. They do. They do care about providing the best product. So if you take all that across the board, whether like restaurants are always like the easiest, simple example, right? Like, you go to a restaurant, if you have a bad experience once, what are the chances of you going back to that restaurant? It's the same thing with golf. It's the same thing with destinations. It's the same thing with all that. So if everybody's kind of going towards that same goal that that's kind of why I always lean on like the Bay of Quinte Belleville, example, of like, all of them, kind of, they don't care if that group goes and plays that course down the street, because they know next year that they're going to come back and play their course, and as long as they're providing a really good product, that's all that really matters, because people are going to suss that out. So I think that's the big one of when you're talking about, like, collaborative stuff, is that, and I've learned this probably the hard way, you know, a few years ago too, is like you can't do everything yourself, and being able to have conversations and honest conversations, I think that that's something that we've always done, is like we provide the feedback. I'm a pretty blunt person, so I like, I'll tell you what it what it is, and what I see, and hopefully we can make it work. But I think that's something that a collaborative kind of thing is kind of what sets us apart?

Andrew Siegwart  33:21  
Yeah, and I think that's really good advice for any other sector, is to really dive into that. And what you're what you're saying is it might not necessarily matter if we win the business today, but if my colleague or competitor down the road wins the business, our regional brand wins, and then that means I get better potential for business down the track, and we're positioning ourselves as a golf destination.

Brad Kozak  33:48  
You hit the hood, nail in the head. I think that a group of 20 people that end up going this is sometimes a positive thing for us, is, you know, they might be getting a quote from directly from the property, directly from us, and maybe somebody else. The interesting part is when we have access to their T shirts, and you see the last names that are on those T sheets, and however they booked, maybe they have a buddy that's a member, or they have access to a different way to save a couple dollars, like we look at that as still a win, because they, you know, they went through us. They, you know, everybody does their due diligence. Wherever you're traveling. You look at, you know, best rates and best this, it's not just one size fits all type thing. So I like, that's a win for us too, because it if that golf course then sees, like, oh well, that group from Quebec actually came, and then the group from Michigan did come to if you're a forward thinking operator, you know, we're both friends with Martin at dungeon Highlands, and, like, I use him as an example for everything, because he's just, I don't know, like their their operation up there, so good, because they care. And that's the biggest, that's the biggest thing, I think, to take away

Andrew Siegwart  34:53  
for sure, yeah, and aligning yourself with partners like that who really want to be creative and collaborative. Well, you. That's, it's great advice. And you know, I dare say that you might find yourself in a in a situation soon where other sectors might come to you to say, hmm, maybe we should be collaborating with your platform in a different way. That's my prediction. We'll see if it, if it comes true. There you go. Some, some business growth ideas.

Brad Kozak  35:18  
No, I love it. I, you know, I could talk about this stuff all day. So I you know those, yeah, it's

Andrew Siegwart  35:22  
amazing. The discovery calls and thank you. Thanks for sharing your your insights and also just your enthusiasm and excitement for it. I mean, I think that's that's more than 50% of the success is someone who believes in it and someone who's really driving it for the benefit of the consumer and the operators and to really champion your your sport, your community. I mean, that's what that's what resonates. And, you know, it leads me to a question. It really does demonstrate why you were chosen among your peers as one of our tourism champions of the year, because you really embody what the industry sees as the path forward for growth and innovation. And innovation. And, you know, I just want to congratulate you for this recognition, and I'm really excited to to present you with your award at our conference in a few weeks time. But I'm wondering, you know, in this position that you have, and in your this part of your career, tell me what do you see as the right vision for, you know, tourism in Ontario going forward, not in just, not in terms of the dollars or the scale, but the experience the people in the communities, like, what do you think Ontario needs to bring to get us to that next level?

Brad Kozak  36:32  
Ontario's got a lot of stuff, and I think that that's a good thing and a bad thing, right? We can kind of check every single box and every area is a little bit different. And being able to expand on the stories of London and Muskoka and these other places that have these unique things, I think the one thing that hitting home is summer is all is undefeated when it comes to weather and that type of stuff, the summer activities. I feel like we should be getting the US traveler, the international traveler, people coming to Canada when the weather is best. Because I think, you know, from November 1 till, you know, April, end of April, like it's just kind of two hit or miss, like Toronto's Great. Being inside is fine. I don't want to travel with a jacket. So it's just one of those things. I think that if we're able to kind of have those pillars of the summer product, I think that's when people are gonna come spend money, because that's, that's when, you know, I think that's when weather is the best, that's when everybody's smiling, that's when everyone's outside, that's when restaurants are performing at their highest. I think that that's a big one moving forward, is like, how do we dive into that summer stuff and and what that looks

Andrew Siegwart  37:43  
like? Yeah, and I think a lot of people overestimate how much or underestimate how much capacity there still is in summer, like it is our high season, but there is still a lot of room for growth in summer. 100% you're absolutely

Brad Kozak  37:57  
right. Everybody fights for that, that that number one kind of spot they want, right? But that number one spots become bigger. So how do we like? One of the questions that we ask when we go into a golf course is, you know, if we're not going to book nine AMT times, that's totally fine. What times are available that you feel like we can we can do, and whether that's a group on their arrival day, they always get included at dungeon Highlands, or whether it's their departure day on the way home. Like we come up with these maps of directions of where people are going, and there's a way to fit it into your business, if it's always you know, you're busy until two o'clock. Okay, what? What do you have on site that after two o'clock that we can dive into like black bear ridge and Belleville. They have a nine hole. They have a short course, a par three course. Like, let's try and take advantage of that more. You know, if all their other inventory is gone, how do we get people to the properties to do it? So there's always ways to work around it. It's just kind of figuring out what that

Andrew Siegwart  38:56  
is, being focused on the goal and finding the right? And the most logical opportunities, which is, is something we should always look at. I think sometimes we, you know, when we when we look at the future, we we start to look at all these different goals. And sometimes what we forget is, there's, there's some easy, low hanging fruit, places to focus, where there's still opportunity, and it's where we have the most resources, right? So, good advice, good advice. Explain how the golf in Ontario platform works. Just like

Brad Kozak  39:27  
the basics. You send in a cool request through our website. We have our quick quote form, and then we have a request to quote. If somebody knows exactly where they want to go, what they want to do, they can kind of inquire about the specific package that we have, and then the quick quote form is used just to kind of get some ideas going. So from there, consumer goes into our CRM and then, and then we kind of follow up, follow up, follow up, have our sales process. From there, we kind of dive into what that person and that group directly wants. We put together a custom itinerary for them. From there we have terms and conditions sign. Offs, deposits, payments, all that type of stuff, kind of all the way to to fruition. So we have itineraries that we send out 45 to 3030, 45 days in advance, and then, yeah, we just, kind of, we're a travel agency that focus on golf. That's really, really what it comes down to.

Andrew Siegwart  40:15  
Well, thank you so much. Thanks for spending time with us today and just sharing a little bit more about this really compelling program and your experience behind it. And again, congratulations on this recognition, very well deserved. And we're really excited to, you know, put a spotlight on golf, on outdoor adventure, and, of course, all of your great

Brad Kozak  40:35  
work. Thank you. It's, it's exciting, I think, to just get when people think about golf travel. You know, the PEIS come up Myrtle Beach comes up Scotland, but I think it's going to be really interesting just to see golf in Ontario, be at the forefront with that, and be able to kind of just be from the center. It's great, but we're really excited. I don't know. I'm not. I don't usually get lost for words, but when you reached out about it, I was kind of like, okay, that's a that's a good one. So yeah, thank you. And we're excited. Good well,

Andrew Siegwart  41:07  
and you know what you put it is on the map. We are global caliber, and it is people like you that is making that happen. So on behalf of everyone in this business, thank you. Thanks for all your great work. Definitely. You welcome to part two of our episode, speaking with our 2025 tourism champions of the year. Let's settle in for a great conversation with Trevor Norris, Senior Manager of destination development for the Bay of Quinte Regional Marketing Board. Hi Trevor, thanks for joining us on forward motion, and congratulations on being named one of our tourism champions of the year.

Trevor Norris  41:46  
Hi, Andrew, thank you so much for having me. And yeah, I've been wanting to I've been a big fan of your podcast. Think you're a terrific host. I've listened to all of them, and it's a real honor to be here.

Andrew Siegwart  41:59  
Oh, thank you so much. I mean, for us, it's such a joy to tell the stories of of our industry and the change makers across the province. So it's a pleasure to have you with us today. Tell us what first inspired you to pursue regenerative experience based tourism in the Bay of Quinte. What was the moment when you realized that tourism could be a force of community benefit as well as economic benefit?

Trevor Norris  42:19  
I kind of made the biggest mistake that a lot of smaller and rural regions make, and it came from a bit of misplaced frustration thinking that, you know, we didn't have those big assets and those big tourism draws that a lot of other regions have. And I was comparing our region to other regions and figuring out how we could compete, and it just came from a misplaced lens, if you will, from that old paradigm. Wasn't until I had traveled and had a chance to actually see a real connection between a traveler and a local a non traditional host in a small community make a real connection to a guest and see that transformation that made me realize, oh, it's our people that are the things that we are the important assets that we need to champion. And so coming back to the region with that new lens, I think at the time, experiential was sort of starting to kind of take hold in the travel industry and people going, I don't want to be on that bus tour and then go to the gift shop and then get back on the bus. I want to meet that guy on the beach, that crab fisherman, and what's his story. And you know, how do I talk to him? And so seeing my role change dramatically to wow, I've got to find some people in our region. I've got to start looking in places I hadn't looked before. And what is our identity? What is what are we all about? And so we took a little while to kind of pause and and go into our community and listen and listen to stories, meet people, find out why they love living there, and for us to redefine our definition of who we even thought we were. And then from there, realize, Wow, we do have a special place. We need to figure out a way to tell these stories. And most importantly, we need to get buy in from locals that tourism can be this forest, we're good. We need to protect this home that they love so much, and we love so much as well. And so, you know, that's the core to regenerative is making a connection, a real connection, to a guest, and for them to walk away, wanting to champion the region, wanting to leave it better off than when they arrived, and at the same time giving all those voices a voice to our local community and business owners who didn't think they were in tourism, a hand in the destiny of how we grow that tourism infrastructure and that tourism sector that we're we're trying to build.

Andrew Siegwart  44:53  
It's really an important reminder that if we try. Try to emulate what others are doing. It actually works against building Ontario's brand as an exciting place. It just it results in a sameness that isn't compelling, right? So what you've done is you've really looked at what is unique about our community, and how do we tap into that? And I, I also love what you're saying about regenerative, because I think a lot of people think of the word regenerative, and they immediately think about environment or sustainability. And regenerative, from your perspective, is about the people and about the community first, which then leads into some of those other pieces. So I think you're pointing out some really important facts.

Trevor Norris  45:36  
I have this crazy little analogy too, and it sort of hit me a few years ago, you know, the old tourism model world was like we were given keys to someone's house. We didn't know who they were. We didn't know the rules, and we went in and for a week, we kind of ate food out of the refrigerator and maybe wore our money shoes into places, left garden. We shouldn't, you know, that was kind of the model. But imagine now we get to meet that owner. Night One, have dinner, meet the kids, find out why they dinner. Love this house. Why meet the neighbors, you know, get invited to a street dance, and then we get to have our vacation. We We then go through the process of being in a destination with a much different feeling. Not only does our behavior get modified, but there's empathy that guest bill, so that's like, to me, like a fun little analogy that sometimes I talk about how the difference of how tourism is changed right where we're getting to meet the people and we now we have this respect for where we are and why they love this place and what we're visiting.

Andrew Siegwart  46:46  
For those of our listeners who might not be as familiar with the Bay of Quinte region, can you just maybe just give us a quick summary of where and what it is

Trevor Norris  46:54  
we're situated on the north shore of Lake Ontario, so right kind of in Eastern Ontario, right in between Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. So a really important corridor Destination Canada is even sort of highlighted that quarter is very important. Quarter. We get to see all sorts of interesting demographics. We get, you know, travelers from Quebec, you know, coming south from Ottawa, then coming east from Toronto, as well as some us travel coming through the Gananoque, you know, 1000 Islands corridor there. And so it's a really great opportunity to showcase a half urban and rural type destination. We represent four municipalities, Brighton, Quinte, West Belleville, Napanee and our First Nations partners, Mohawks, of the bay, and the five of us together make up what is the Bay of Quinte. We all touch the base with the relationship water agriculture, but also some typical infrastructure, you know, some urban infrastructure, so we kind of have a really nice balance of all three.

Andrew Siegwart  47:58  
And the way you describe regenerative tourism, and you talked about that coming and connecting with the community and getting to meet people in the work that you've done. Would you say that that is a through line among independent sort of, let's say sharing economy hosts small tours as well as some of the larger businesses. Like are larger businesses able to provide that type of experience as

Trevor Norris  48:23  
well? Yeah, it's, you know, we started with Trickle Up To be honest. You know, we felt that our easiest win was finding smaller, experienced providers who could then easily teach and absorb these concepts that were like, you know, at first a little hard to digest because we didn't, we know, a lot of people hadn't heard about, you know, a lot of the green tech and, you know, eco tourism, and it was in our world with an experience you can get to with a small Group, it's easily manageable, and then also build in things that you know the visitor doesn't even know. There's a Passover generation going on where we build in a component to our ticket prices or the experiences we build that go back into the community. And every experience provider that we coach or we work with, you know, can choose what cause they want to give back to the community. It could be anything from, you know, training programs for youth at our conservation area, to food banks to, you know, to shelters, to anything Humane Society. The point is that revenue, or the economy that's being built, there's this passive income that's going back into the community automatically. And then add in the circular economy, adds with builds with the partnerships that these experienced partners get to now they'll bringing in local chefs or someone to do the catering, or someone a local musician or an artist to twin with to to make the experience a little more immersive, or added a dimension that they're building these. These partnerships now that that little snowball that we just started at the top of the mountain is starting to roll, and I'm seeing my experienced partners now work across the communities and get to know people that they had known, and get to understand our people in the community that can do zero waste catering. And wow, look at these growers and these farm producers that can, I can. I didn't know we're there that are, yeah, we can. We'll sell you this stuff, and we'll, we're making this product here locally. You can get it from us. You don't have to buy it elsewhere. So that's been really rewarding for me to see, is that the snowball, you know, now gaining momentum and pride from that, and so bigger businesses are taking notice. And that trickle up also goes to our municipal government as well. And in councils, you know, these people are becoming voices for Regenerative tourism, for tourism as a force for good in our communities, and they're starting to make that agenda, you know, more and more a priority for decisions being made.

Andrew Siegwart  51:03  
I think that's brilliant. And you're really tapping into the the expertise and innovation in an in an independent entrepreneurs world, and you're influencing others. It's the counter narrative that we often hear right? The narrative is everyone's got to band together to support small business in a way that that's very true. But what we miss sometimes is that actually it goes in reverse too. But I

Trevor Norris  51:24  
fought the whole idea of like, this top down, if I, if I, we bring in this big regenerative tourism strategy. Or, you know what took us a while to even get involved, like for me, us to sit down to, like a green step certification sustainability, because, you know, that's just a piece of paper or a big report that doesn't resonate, and so we really had to show the real connection behind that, and then we could come in with things like that and start to build with a lot of those voices now who weren't at the table, who are now and now influencing how that strategy gets built. So it's much easier for me to now implement things like that, because we have buy in from the ground up.

Andrew Siegwart  52:05  
Tell me the the experience crafting program you developed has brought, I mean, you brought over 10 experiences to the market to build this kind of Community Give Back environmental stewardship. Can you walk us through how you design and vet these types of experiences to make sure that they are resonating with what visitors are looking for, and also fitting that right local sustainability or community need.

Trevor Norris  52:26  
Yeah, and you know what? It's funny. We when I started the program, there's been a bit of a shift. The program is always changing, which is great. The beautiful thing about experience development is that it requires a lot of listening to the community, and also keeping your finger on the pulse of what's happening in places in your community that you hadn't really paid attention to. So we really like to start with that listening component. We try and find champions and storytellers in our region that maybe haven't had a voice before. For me, I've had some incredible experiences with involving new Canadians who haven't given either through a language barrier or through barriers to entry, of application process, to workshops. We now have a verbal application because our indigenous community and also and new Canadians, it was a little more difficult to get through things like a written application. So we're adapting to our community to be able to find the right champions and find those great stories. And it's really the revelation of the non traditional tourism host that has really brought our tourism story or identity to the forefront, which is so cool. These people that were never in the tourism industry. Didn't think they could be in through and now are running these immersive experiences, and farmers and makers and entrepreneurs who are now inviting people into their spaces, who do they didn't think were cool spaces, or how did you know our guests get to walk away with such an intimate perspective on these people's lives and become champions of what they're trying to do. And so that's the first step, is trying to find those great champions. And then from there, you know, it's our responsibility, like I said, to adjust to them, to work with their different personalities. It's not a one shoe fits all situation. We work with every sort of partner differently, and then also, we've started building experiences in kind of a different way here, where we want to make sure tourism is still accessible, still affordable, and but have that sustainability component to it. We're not Tofino. We're not Fogo Island. Can't be putting the market for a $200 $250 experience. Is there for some people, but we want locals to be able to go to these experiences. So developing a good mix, when we talk about the economics of experience building where locals can still be a part, bring their families to family, to an experience, and get. Experience their home in a different way, and meet their neighbors and go and see the experience, and then also learn about regenerative concepts, or stay sustainability or some environmental things they hadn't learned about along the way, which you know is digestible and easy. I was starting to kind of stray on a bit because I wanted that high value traveler. But a lot of the you're preaching to the converted, right? I want to teach people who've never heard about regenerative tourism, who don't ever get to travel outside the province and reach those people in our backyard. And I think if we can get a good mix of, you know, having locals feel like they have a, you know, accessible, affordable access to tourism in their own backyard, but also serve the guests coming in internationally, but from other provinces. I mean, that's a beautiful balance, right? And so play in both those those sandboxes, and we sort of develop experiences, and our experience partners kind of know how to build those two streams really well.

Andrew Siegwart  56:03  
Well, I mean, high value is really the eye of the beholder. It's how you define value. Some might define that as high spend. Some might define that as community minded and respectful or aligned with what you what you have on offers. I think you're still driving at a high value. It's just the values are different, which I think is great. It's alignment of values. Values Exactly.

Trevor Norris  56:24  
We want to attract visitors who align with how our ethos here and our identity and, you know, a respect for, obviously, our communities. But at the same point, we are trying to build these businesses so we don't want to be in the discount economy. We left that purposely and very intentionally years and years ago, and volume travel to be able to be in this world. And so, like I said, a fine balance to be had, and we're still learning a ton as a destination that is very mixed. We have different economic demographics that come here and live here, and so we want to be able to have tourism for all.

Andrew Siegwart  57:03  
Could you give us an example? I don't want you to say it's a favorite or or anything like that, because you give us an example of one of the experiences where you think gives a good demonstration of the of the theory. A

Trevor Norris  57:13  
great example is Elaine kudos from a farm called Bramble Berry. She's a second generation blueberry farmer. Her and mom, and we developed an experience with her. I think it was the first kind of, one of the first iterations of our experience, crafting workshop. It was a program called, let's get growing. Elaine is one of those people where I, you know, made the mistake of putting boundaries on her, and I didn't really realize that I had to play to her strengths. And I almost kind of killed her spirit by saying, You got to pick just three activities. And here's the template, and she wanted to do 13 activities, and put them all into this experience where you know, you're teaching people providence of food and how to grow your own food, and you learn how to all the things they grow on the farm, but also take away your own little garden and how to cultivate that and how to grow those plants and make your own tea. Do Bannock on the fire? You do get to go, get to go and prune blueberry bushes and learn how to, like take care of a plant that maybe some people had in the process of that, and learn their day to day activities. So anyway, we had this big experience that was all wrapped up into a big package. It was like four hours. It was amazing. Lunch came in the price point we kind of started it at, and the this big, choreographed experience she was, I guess, and I'm not always become Matt philan, but it's an intimidating for someone who'd never run an experience, to run something that big and also at a price point that large, into the, you know, 150 $175 person. That's a big spend for a lot of people and a lot of locals. We were kind of spinning our tires on it and trying to get traction. And then she, kind of, on her own, decided to chop it up a little bit more, and she understood the accessibility, affordability element before I even did. And she's actually really informed me as to how and now she offers different tiers of experiences, components of these experiences, where locals can take parts of that experience, weave together, instill a beautiful, immersive, regenerative you're taught about the providence of food, talk about her life and story. It's attached to story. It's immersive, but the same point, it's not cost prohibitive. And then there's also the larger experience, which she sells to corporate groups to inbound tourists, who, you know the twos and the fours and the sixes are coming in and want to spend a day with her, or a half day. And so she recognized early that we needed to kind of pivot on how we sort of built accessible experiences, but we were really adamant about keeping that story and that sustainability element that we had worked so hard to kind of build into our experience development. So that's like one great example of how it just sort of happened organically, and we started in one place, and also you got to play to your people's strengths. Elaine needed to be. Her, and so you just lean in and you support your champions on however they want to do it. It's about listening to them, right? And you know, knowing that maybe a four hour experience is a little intimidating for someone to do a farmer for the first time, to kind of run, and there's a lot expectation, because they feel the weight of maybe a price point, or that type of traveler coming in who expects a certain level of quality, and so we're really being mindful as to who we are as a region our authentic self. We are being less scripted. Mesley is good. That's where connection comes, when you just let people be themselves, and then they meet other people, and they can get, let their guard down. It's more important for us to have people build a connection than to walk away with all this prescriptive they learn it through the experience anyway, because they're there. You know, you think about, Oh, I gotta really weave these things in. But, you know, it's been a good lesson to make things digestible. Do small. Wins start small, and we keep going back to that.

Andrew Siegwart  1:01:04  
What I really like, what you're talking about is sometimes in our world, and those experienced developers who are listening, and we've we've all played a role, I've been involved in experience development, we tend to think of it as a process where there's a start, a middle and an end, and then it goes to market. And what you're really saying is experience development is iterative. There's not an end. It's actually a process of constantly evolving and playing in that space. And I think that's good advice. When you have creative entrepreneurs who who throw curve balls in there, that's actually what makes it unique. That's what makes it different.

Trevor Norris  1:01:37  
You know, the beautiful part about my job and what I love most about being a coach and being invited into these amazing people's orbits. I'm so grateful to work with all these people every day, because I'm just in awe of the resilience and their innovation and their talents. Is that they force me to never really close the book, to always be revisiting and revising and bringing new elements in. And so our program is always evolving. It's evolved year to year. It evolves month to month. Our experience partners getting point where they want to be mentors to other experienced partners, and they're starting to teach the program on my behalf. I mean, I love nothing more than just being able to sit in the workshop and have experienced partners up there talking to other new, experienced partners and teaching them about all their lessons learned and all these amazing concepts like that, is the most rewarding thing for me to be the guide on the side as who, as they say, in a program like that, is which is essential to a Great experience, is like the epitome of where we're trying to go with this and capacity building as well. Yeah, then that the industry starts to just teach itself and build on itself. And it's such an amazing thing to watch.

Andrew Siegwart  1:02:52  
It's incredible. And thanks for sharing it with us. Thanks for sort of giving us more detail on it. And I think it's important to dive in a little bit, because you start to learn where the where the innovation is in this space. And you know, well, you know this, but our listeners don't know this. But I mean, you're getting noticed. This work is getting noticed beyond our local boundaries. Destination, Canada selected your work as a case study in their destination dialog series. You know, making bay of Quinte one of these. You know, world destinations that are featured in a national conversation. So tell me, has that recognition and awareness had an impact on the local business? Have you seen more awareness of what you're doing?

Trevor Norris  1:03:30  
First of all, like obviously, I want to thank Celeste DEVAR from Earth rhythms. He's been mentoring me and been coaching me for many, many years. He got this amazing opportunity with Destination Canada, to highlight some rural destinations you've been working with, he put us forward. It's people who believe, who believed in us and saw that we had a story to tell and that we could maybe help other rural regions with some of our challenges and some of our things. So that was number one, number two. It's such a huge, proud moment for our community. I mean, there's so many people that have moved to this region who were believers, first adopters, way, way before I moved here and became had a small part in shedding a tiny light on all this, and for a small region, it's validation that our stories matter and the things we're doing matter and people want to hear about it. So it was a massive confidence boost. It was kind of like the parent telling kids, like, Hey, you gotta but then fun uncle comes in, like, we believe fun uncle Andrew, you know, believed, you know, it was a real, valid issue, like, Oh, someone else is telling us this, it's destination, Canada, of all people. So such a booster community pride. It opened the door for new partnerships, and most of all, it really started the shared practices with other rural regions, other rural regions, starting. Getting in touch with us, wanting to talk to other businesses in our community and share their stories, and then you start to really break down the competition. A collaboration over competition, businesses and partnerships are the local community starting seeing like, oh yeah, collaboration is going to make us stronger. We need to go and talk to Boston Valley, you know, we need to go and talk to southwest Ontario. We need to we need to share practices with Bay of Fundy, and let's talk about our channel and as a group, as a as a whole, across Canada, it's starting to break down these barriers between us feeling disconnected from each other. We're not working in these silos, right? We have conferences, and I put tayo and impacts on the things that you've put together, putting destinations in a room where we can collaborate and share and innovate, and move Canada into such a positive direction, to be tourism leaders for Responsible travel and for experiential and for having rural regions and smaller destinations also at the forefront with with the larger destinations, all in balance, it's a beautiful thing that's happening and and, you know, I applaud Destination Canada for taking their approach and your strategic plan, as well as is rooted in making sure that there's support to rural regions alongside those urban destination because There's some really special people that need their stories told, and sometimes they just don't have the platform or the ability to do so we owe it to them and to us to really find the fabric of what it is to be Canadian and find all those people that make up that that fabric and tell those stories. So yeah, if

Andrew Siegwart  1:06:39  
we've learned anything over the last few years in terms of some of the adversity that we've experienced, but how we've overcome it, and how, how more resilient we are as an industry, I can see across all of these different communities that we work with, or our industry, is is getting it done. We are very proud of our achievements, and we're striving for greater impact. And, you know, I think what, what you have been building here and talking about, and what, what we talked about with Brad earlier, what he's building and growing, you know, are really good examples of our industry just being more ambitious. I want to sort of pivot our discussion a little bit, just today, in fact, we launched our summer survey. So we have a survey that we went out to to all the province and operators in the province to try to get a handle on June and July, August. We were very concerned about tariff impacts, and we were concerned about economic performance. And the good news is, is that our domestic market has really come through for Ontario tourism operators. But there was a really interesting data set that came through. Over 50% of the businesses that we surveyed identified some impacts from extreme climate and weather this summer, over 50% talking about heat, talking about smoke, wildfires, access to forests and trails, flooding, et cetera. Realistically, we have to focus on adaptation, and we have to be prepared. I'm wondering, given the kind of work that you do in this regenerative space and a lot of land and agri culinary programming that you have, have you seen anything in the market this summer, or any adaptation strategies that are percolating like, what? What is your community talking about on this

Trevor Norris  1:08:18  
front to be honest, Andrew, I think we're still at the stage of like, building awareness that this, that there is a climate crisis. There's still a lot of people who aren't on board with that. This is happening, and now it's really becoming apparent. When you have people, especially with a very outdoor adventure type region, we have a very region that's tied to agritourism, and with water, you're seeing things like, you know, the water levels changing year year. And the interesting thing is, locals and visitors are experiencing this thing together. They're hearing from locals that we've never seen this before. We've never seen this type of drought. We had a huge drought in the region over the summer. I had never seen anything like it in my 1015, years here, and then seeing people going to these farms and doing these experiences, and seeing farmers struggle, and seeing how they're adapting and how difficult this is. And is this going to be happening on a regular basis? Oh, we're getting it's pretty cloudy out today. That's actually wildfire smoke that's been drifting in from Northern Ontario and from other provinces. And so I think we're getting a lot of uptake on people. Okay, yeah, we know this is real, yeah. And what does this mean? But also, with the tariffs people, it could be a blessing in disguise. Look, we're going to support Canadian we're going to go to our backyard and find out what we can do. And they're discovering regions like us, or rediscovering us and realizing that we can give just an amazing. The experience when it comes to like, you know that your tourism dollars and your vacation dollars, but I also think there's, there's an opportunity for us from a regenerative perspective, we need as a destination. I'm taking this amazing course right now with Synergy. It's a destination sustainability course for GMOs and emergency preparedness, which I any experience on usually that's like municipal, but I feel a responsibility as a tourism professional and to have the latest tools and information and you know trends, but also like you know, from a plan, a plan exactly, and because that's a role I didn't we didn't typically have back then. And so now I'm stepping into these other roles, which I think are really part and parcel of what it is to be in destination development and have regenerative as a mindset is that you need to learn other facets of other you know, skills to, you know, from coaching, from facilitation to environmental climate literacy to a climate plan. So like we're working on our our first Climate Action Plan, that we will hopefully start educating and giving some tools to our tourism businesses, not only tourism, our community as a whole, influencing our municipalities to like we need to actually start connecting on our climate crisis plan and our sustainability. We need to, we need to all be on the same page. So it's getting everybody on the same page. So I feel a little bit of, I would say, panic, to kind of really get working on this now. I mean, we're way behind the eight ball on a lot of these things. You know, aside from all the other things I do, I think it's important that, you know, small business owners don't have a lot of time to actually sometimes do that research and to find those tools. I think it's a responsibility for the DMO to really get into those spaces and be involved and learn and bring that back and have digestible tools and using people like yourself, your team, creating those tools for us as DMOS, to then be able to get those to our stakeholders and our businesses. It's so important to have all be working together on this.

Andrew Siegwart  1:12:12  
I have good news to share with you and to our listeners. There's an initiative that's that's percolating right now to come forward, to really create a tourism related emergency response and climate response plan that can be something that is a bit of a standardized approach across the country. Well, a whole bunch of players involved, so there's more to come on that, but it's good, and we need to work together, because let's do it as a team, so that we're not doing some overlap. But you know, for me, in our Ontario strategic plan, there's a whole pillar on Investment Attraction. And I think Investment Attraction and climate adaptation go hand in hand. So when I think of summer and I think of visitation, I think of, do we have shade structures for people who can enjoy our outdoor environments but take a break from the sun? Do we have cooling places, but do we have enough resources to plant urban or more forests, or more trees to provide that kind of shape? So to me, there's an investment component here that I think is another opportunity. So it's looking at it, you know, at a 360 degree view well, and

Trevor Norris  1:13:14  
we're seeing conservation, or conservation, we have a lot of conservation, like there are huge carbon sinks. Yeah, we play a big role in that, in in how we can sequester carbon, and how do we then balance that with having people come in and drive, we're a drive to location, right? So we have to try and offset that, and figure out how we do that. And the other thing is, like, it's amazing to see how tourism is starting to become a real catalyst for change. You know, we're setting some really great examples for other industries and starting to be leaders and influencing government with our voice, as opposed to just being the lovely host, the advocacy we're doing to then make real change with things like climate crisis plan and strategy. I just find that really inspiring. And I love being a part of that, something that I didn't know anything about 10 years ago, and to be now part of that, and seeing like, wow, we can really influence, not only individual guests coming in and modify behaviors with just small changes, and that trickle effect is huge, but also your advocacy to when we go to Queen's Park Ontario is a little we have some room to grow. We when we go and I go west, I see that the relationship that BC has with their indigenous communities and how how much farther ahead they are, we need to push those agendas, and we need to go out and build relationships with those communities a lot better me working every day to to have my 1000 T's with my my beautiful Mohawk partners and and build that relationship from a real place of respect and love and protect the story that they're trying to tell. And then at the same. Point help introduce them to our community members that been to an indigenous community for and my colleague that works for the mocks, but like they're so lovely, learning from her and being a part of that, but also as a as an industry, bringing those voices to our summits and our events like impact youth, bring in young people, students and those underserved communities, and allowing them to have access to this like a really hope next year to be able to, like, put some funds away, to bring some people who couldn't come to things like impact, yeah, because they need to be in the room, and they need to, like, hear some of the things We're talking about, and it's just getting that out to a larger audience, that message and some of the things that we're talking about, and I know it's sorry, always corny to say, but honestly, like tourism is a force for good, right? And it's showing that it can be. And I see it in our community. Our community has done it. It never underestimate your community.

Andrew Siegwart  1:15:59  
That is, you know, some of the best advice that you could really share with our listeners. It's no no coincidence that you were named one of our tourism champions of the year. You really are a champion for others and a champion for your community, and you're a champion for us. So I want to really thank you for taking the time to share your your stories with us, to talk a little bit more about what's happening in your region and and for your passion. Thank you. It's infectious what you're doing and the impact that you're making is not only economic growth, but it's, it's community growth, and I think that's the best recipe. So congrats.

Trevor Norris  1:16:37  
Thanks, Andrew. I mean, it's a little uncomfortable for me to you know this, this award as a word, because it's such a recognition of a collective that is so much larger than me, hundreds and hundreds of people in our community, and it really speaks to their efforts, and for me to be able to have a little part in their orbits, and to be able To lucky to have a bit of a be in a position to amplify that. I'm always so grateful every day, to be able to have that opportunity for them, and, you know, the Bay of Quinte, by being recognized and the things that they've all accomplished, we can inspire other communities around Canada to realize, like their stories are an important part of the fabric of how we tell the larger Canadian story. That's what like it's all about, for me. So I was

Andrew Siegwart  1:17:26  
listening to an interview with Brene Brown yesterday, who, of course, of course, you would know, is a organizational leader and talks about empathy and leadership. And one of the things that she said was, the best leaders understand that they are in service of others. I think what you just summarized is a perfect example of what she's talking about, which is great leadership. So thank you. I cannot wait to celebrate you and your community at our upcoming summit and our awards ceremony on the 29th I love

Trevor Norris  1:17:55  
chatting with you, Andrew, as you know, we always find a corner to sneak away, and our chats are always so illuminating, and you've taught me so much, been able to learn so much from you and and I really appreciate your championing us in the bay pointy, but also, you know, rural regions and and Carol and team and so, yeah, I look forward to the Ottawa and being in amongst all Our amazing, inspiring colleagues and operators and people doing great things. It's helping change the narrative. It's helping people understand that they can leave a place they visit better off, and this is how you do it. And it's very timely, especially now, isn't it great? We work in an industry that celebrates what is beautiful about humankind. I find that so great.

Andrew Siegwart  1:18:43  
What motivates us to get out of bed in the morning and do what we do? And for those of you who are listening, there's still plenty of time to join us at the summit. Not only if you come, are you going to get great content and great networking, but you're going to join Trevor and I as we close down club Ontario again for second year for one of those chats. So come join us.

Trevor Norris  1:19:02  
Absolutely.

Mary Anne Ivison (Voiceover)  1:19:06  
Thanks for listening to forward motion. This show is created by the tourism industry association of Ontario and is recognized by government as the voice of tourism and produced by everyone at the sound off media company. You.