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Introduction:
After my early retirement as a German aerospace engineer in an European helicopter company I established our own small company. We started importing and exporting goods between Canada and Europe.
As soon as Internet was available we used this media for selling our products. Our entire Internet presence is home made. My Canadian wife was always an excellent critic and advisor if she had time to do that.
In the meantime we are almost 20 years in business. We gained in this time lots of experience about how to run a business and how to designs successful web sites.
We saw a huge market in the tourist sector and started just to get some feed back with an English Internet tourist guide for Bavaria and a German one for Ontario.
The response was very promising - even not German speaking visitors of our site called us at night to ask questions. They recommended creating an English variant. So far, we did not decide to do that because I believed that it should be an easy task for qualified Canadians to present their beautiful province in such a way that people want to come.
We tried to go in a partnership government funded tourist organizations to promote Ontario to the large German speaking market but they were not interested. We made the same experience in Germany.
A positive exception was the province of Newfoundland - Labrador. They provided advice, pictures and invited us even to a great dinner.
How we work:
We do not charge anything for preparing and updating our Internet tourist guides for Ontario and Newfoundland - Labrador. If a new magazine or newspaper goes on the market they do not charge anything either.
However they charge for advertising and promotions. We want to do the same.
It is our responsibility to present Ontario in such a way that people from the German speaking countries in Europe are aware what to see and what to do. We also want to prevent disappointing experiences. In order to do that you must know the difference in culture and customs as well as their expectations.
Europeans are different to Americans - at least in many things.
German is the mother tongue of most people in Western Europe and many people learn it as a second language. To ignore this market and to make false statements such as "Everybody in Germany speaks English" demonstrate that those people know absolute nothing.
It is a fact that people who come from overseas will stay longer and spend also more money. It is a necessity that they need transportation, food and accommodation. They also want to go shopping for things which they do not get at home or for more money. But nobody will book such along trip because we have hotels, restaurants and souvenir shops. Just check and compare a typical Canadian tourist site with ours. You can do that without understanding German.
One of our main tasks is also to make sure that our web sites can be handled by elderly people. They are a major group of visitors and they want to learn about the country and not fight with all the bells and whistles which you can use for web design. We are responsible to get the urgently needed visitors to our province. For that reason our different approach.
A web site which can not be found is also useless. We always check our work and do improvements to make sure that this is being achieved when you use proper key words.
We also believe that it is mandatory to inform potential customers always in their mother tongue. We do not like to mix English and German web sites in our travel guides, We try to stick to one language.
As already said - we want to attract different people from Europe to Ontario by showing them as much as possible about our beautiful province. We do this without getting affected by any business interests, but we gladly listen to advice if we forgot something or if we made a mistake.
Last not least: not the hits that a web site gets is important, important is how many customers you get through it. We include everything which we learned with our own business in our web sites.
A special feature which we included for the convenience of our visitors is a searchable data base. It is easy to handle and we will keep it always up to date.
We deleted our guest book, because it was too much work to delete daily all the spam.
References:
What we need:
Naturally we need money to continue with our work by improving the existing web site and to be able to include the northern part of Ontario which we could not visit so far.
The needed money should come from advertising in the German language and from designing web sites, which we do gladly in German as well as in English. This is a big money saving for our customers even when the text is slightly different, because a strict translation of the text is in most cases not a good solution.
We also need free access to attractions or events and the permission to take pictures. We achieved this already in Thuringia, Germany.
Our experience in Ontario:
Please do not get angry when you read the following, but we had to listen to so many incompetent people who talked like experts, but in reality they did not even know what they did not know. Obviously that made them feeling so superior.
Some of the worst experiences we made wit the government agencies (Except Newfoundland). They responded to questions which we never asked bur did not get answers to what we want to know. For example Ontario created new tourist regions for the province to improve tourism especially from the USA. Not understanding the high priority of that decision and how it should achieve the task I asked for maps of these new regions. They are not available but I received a large road map which I can not use for updating our Internet guide accordingly.
When I went to a tourist information center they still had sorted all information according to the old tourist regions.
The tourism officials must also use ghost writers when they ask for a bit. They use a weird language and when you ask a question they act rude.
When I tried to include local attractions of the Niagara Region, such as museum I did not get the permission to do take pictures. I believe the Welland Canal is such an attraction and the Welland Canal museum provides some good information. The pictures which I received to use on my web site showed kids playing on the floor. With such references I can not work. I made a similar experience in Welland.
Other museums were extremely helpful,
Pictures are another problem. Sometimes I missed something or our pictures are not good because of the weather conditions. I got CD's with images from many other places in Newfoundland and in Germany, but not from Ontario.
Some proposals::
Do not just complain about the difficulties to cross the border between the USA and Canada, the strong Canadian dollar, the exploding prices for gas - look for all the people who love Canada and have a strong currency, who can fly in and face even higher gas prices in their countries.
That means find solutions and not excuses and not more government funding. Involve the tourism business by telling them what they can do, but provide a proof that your recommendations are well researched.
If I remember correctly the tourist office in little Pelham stated that they had more requests for information from European visitors (especially from Austria) than from other countries.
Make Ontario a more attractive destination for Europeans than it is now. Europeans are not Americans and prepare yourself to please them. There are so many things which would also be appreciated by other groups than those from Europe. Be willing to learn - just making statements is not enough. Do it now!
The following are only a few examples of what we recommend:
• present Ontario better on the Internet. Show maps and show things to do, to see and to experience. Do that better - not worse than the yellow pages in a phone book
• describe things honestly, but not boring. No intelligent person believes that everything in Ontario is second to none. I know that but everything can be improved.
• clean up your cities. Charge fines for littering, ask business to clean up their store fronts and parking lots. Learn from Newfoundland. They also have contests and award towns when they are pretty.
• ask restaurants to post their menus with prices on the outside that people are not afraid to go in.
• convince restaurant owners to improve the cooking skills of their chefs and to offer a wider variety of dishes. The amount of food can be reduces but the quality must be improved. A pork chop which is so though that your hand hurts when you cut it is not a good reputations. Unfortunately, many places which I liked went out of business because the owners retired.
• make better use of the historic places which attract visitors from Europe. Many larger museums, castles, monasteries etc. have a restaurants attached - many in the style of the past. I could not believe how poorly certain events of general interest are promoted, such as the "Siege of Forte Erie". After seeing all the volunteers preparing their meals and going together I became hungry, but the so called "restaurant" closed for dinner and I was reccommended to do go to McDonald's.
• allow visitors to get the charged GST back on fuel. Many European countries sold coupons for cheaper gas to attract visitors about 30 years ago.
• promote nature and wilderness, involve the native people and their culture, involve the French after they find back to their roots. A baguette which you can wrap around your arm is disgusting!
• concentrate on target groups and their expectations. You should have the statistics and can act accordingly. I think this will be older people who will definitely stay longer.
• have essential information also available in other languages than English and French. When I was told that all visitors from Germany speak English I was amazed about so much stupidity. How can you expect that they go fishing if they can nor read the rules?
• if you do not know what to do, ask somebody who knows.
• approach guests from Russia, Asia, Arabia etc. Sometimes Russians are not so easy to handle because of their drinking habits, but they travel.
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