By Hélèna Katz Sometimes it’s hard to be taken seriously when you’re as wild and mysterious as the North. The region’s image as an untamed place with vast open spaces and stunning scenery is a draw for tourists. But for meeting planners, it doesn’t immediately jump to mind as the type of location with the capacity to hold conferences that draw hundreds of delegates. That’s a pity.

The region’s image as an untamed place with vast open spaces and stunning scenery is a draw for tourists. But for meeting planners, it doesn’t immediately jump to mind as the type of location with the capacity to hold conferences that draw hundreds of delegates. That’s a pity.

When Jenni Bruce attended a December trade show in Toronto to promote the NWT as a conference destination, she discovered just how little meeting planners knew about the North’s amenities. “They don’t realize that we have meeting and catering services, so they don’t look at us as an option,” says the general manager of Yellowknife’s Chateau Nova Hotel & Suites. She and representatives from Hay River and Inuvik talked up the territory and distributed copies of a meeting and convention planner that NWT Tourism produced to provide such key information as meeting venues, accommodations and transportation.

Tammie Hennigar, managing director of the Yukon Convention Bureau in Whitehorse, agrees that a lack of awareness about what the territories can offer is one of its biggest obstacles to attracting meetings and conferences. “We still have to deal with myths, like we live in igloos and we don’t have trees,” she says. “We may not have five star hotels but the Yukon is perfect if delegates want a unique experience.” And one that’s not as remote as people think, she points out, since Whitehorse is only 2.5 hours by plane from Vancouver, Calgary or Edmonton.

This ignorance is costing Canada’s three territories a piece of the meetings and conventions sector, which produced more than 673,000 meetings in 2008, according to the 2007-2008 Canadian Economic Impact Study by Meeting Professionals International. The same survey found that these events generated more than $14-billion in annual tax revenues for all levels of government and created the equivalent of more than 550,000 jobs.

The good news is that planners at the Toronto trade show sought out representatives from the NWT and were keen to learn more. “We had people who were actively looking for us and happy to hear about what we had to offer,” Bruce says. “The biggest surprise for them was that we actually have the capacity to hold larger meetings. They thought we could only do 50, that we didn’t have big hotels up here.” Thanks to the two-hour trade show, three new meetings were booked for Yellowknife – two being held in 2011 and one in 2012.

Meeting planners aren’t the only ones to be surprised by the North’s modern amenities. Some 400 delegates poured into Whitehorse in September 2009 for the conference of the Learning Disabilities Association of Canada. “They didn’t expect to find a city of 25,000 people that had all the amenities of a larger city,” says conference coordinator George Green, “where you can go to Starbucks to get a coffee in the morning and you can sit out on a rock in the middle of nowhere.”

The facts are that Whitehorse, Yellowknife, Inuvik and Iqaluit can generally accommodate meetings of up to 300 or 400 delegates, but they have hosted larger gatherings. In 2008, Whitehorse hosted a conference of 1,200 young Lutherans from across Canada. They slept, ate, met and worshipped on the grounds of the Canada Games Centre.

Every June for the past 10 years, Inuvik has organized and hosted some 500 delegates for the Inuvik Petroleum Show. It’s a large crowd for a town of 3,500 people. The Midnight Sun Complex, which includes a community hall meeting space, full-sized arena and curling area, is converted into a conference centre and trade show venue for about 100 booths. The remote location offers delegates less distractions than if they were closer to home, says Larry Peckford, Manager of Economic Development for the Town of Inuvik. “It’s not in a big city and their offices are not there, so they can’t be pulled away.”

When local hotels, bed & breakfasts, apartment buildings and college dorms fill up with delegates, the town of Inuvik has a creative solution to deal with the overflow. “If we were really to get busy, we have the barge accommodations,” Peckford explains. The barge has about 40 self-contained rooms. “Some folks kinda like it because it’s a new experience. It’s not hotel accommodation but it’s quite good.”

But the logistics of larger gatherings can be tricky. No single Yellowknife hotel could accommodate the 600 delegates that came to the 2009 International Congress on Circumpolar Health, and no meeting space was large enough to host them. So Sir John Franklin and St. Patrick High Schools were temporarily converted into a conference centre for the event. St. Pat’s is also used extensively – together with the auditoriums at the Capitol Theatre – for the North’s largest annual gathering, the NWT & Nunavut Chamber of Mines geoscience forum, which regularly draws more than 700 delegates.
For such big conferences, the facilities in the Northern capitals are far from ideal. For the Learning Disabilities Association of Canada’s conference in Whitehorse last September, meetings could be held at the Yukon Convention Centre, but no hotel was large enough to house all the delegates. “I had to work with three different hotels and hire school buses to drive people around,” says Green.

For the health congress in Yellowknife, students rolled out carpets and lined up chairs to turn a double gym into a space for plenary sessions. Classrooms without a dividing wall could hold 125 people for workshops. “It was quite a bit of additional work having to transfer two high schools into what would be a conference centre for the international circumpolar health conference,” says Susan Chatwood, executive director of the event’s host society, the Institute for Circumpolar Health Research.

“We had to have a lot of things trucked in, like chairs and podiums, because there were not enough for that size of event.” Congress coordinator Pat Thagard even brought in couches so delegates would have a place to sit in hallways. “It really takes a lot of logistical organization because you have to piece together the people to do it,” Chatwood says. “Having a big conference centre in town would’ve made it seamless.”

The meeting’s delegates used up virtually every accommodation available – and then some. “There were people at the Super 8 [hotel] and people at the Explorer. I think every bed in town was filled and we had people billeting as well,” Chatwood says. “We pushed everything to capacity.” She credits Thagard and members of the community for pulling together to make the event a success. “Having had the Arctic Winter Games, people had some experience with bigger numbers.”

Despite the challenges, Chatwood says the circumpolar health conference demonstrates Yellowknife’s ability to hold larger conferences. “I don’t know how many meetings are not happening here because people are thinking they have 600 [delegates] and we can’t accommodate them.”

Jenni Bruce wants meeting planners to know what the North can deliver – and make it easier for them to get what they need. She says that having a convention bureau in Yellowknife that could provide one-stop shopping to connect planners to suppliers would make it easier to attract meetings.

In March, Yellowknife City Council passed a motion implementing a one per cent marketing levy on hotel rooms. The resulting income of $200,000 to $250,000 will be used to create a convention bureau to promote Yellowknife at trade shows for meeting planners and act as a liaison between planners and local suppliers. “It would save an event planner days of work, which would make us more appealing as a destination,” Bruce says.

She estimates that Yellowknife usually hosts three or four conferences a year of more than 150 delegates (and would, therefore, require more than one hotel), and seldom more than six. She wants to see that number increase to 15. “One every month and a few bonus ones would be great,” she says. She points out that each delegate spends an average of $300 per day on meals, hotels and gifts for family – in addition to flights and conference registration.

Hosting five new meetings a year could pump an additional $1.5-million in revenues into the local economy. “It’s a pretty good return on a one per cent investment and would create additional jobs.” And now is a great time to sell the North. According to a survey by Meeting Planners International, Canadian planners will bring 70 per cent of their meetings to Canada in 2010, compared to 57 per cent in 2009.

The Yukon Convention Bureau, which opened 10 years ago, hosts more than 40 meetings a year of anywhere between 14 and 400 people. Its budget of $350,000 comes from the Yukon government, the City of Whitehorse, partners and sponsorships, and fees from its 114 members. Its staff of three promotes the territory as a meeting destination, offers meeting planners advice about potential venues and activities, helps them organize and conduct site inspections, and connects them to local suppliers. The bureau also sends out requests for proposals on behalf of planners to generate bids for such services as air and ground transportation, accommodation and catering.

The YCB hosted 42 conferences throughout the territory in 2009, 52 in 2006 and 53 in 2004. The meetings, conventions and incentive travel market poured more than $6-million into the territory’s economy in 2008 and another $7.3-million in 2007, when the economic impact of staging the Canada Winter Games is included. Green estimates that the learning disabilities association’s conference last September on its own contributed $600,000 to the territory’s economy.

For its part, Nunavut is taking baby steps to promote itself as a meetings and conference destination. The Baffin Regional Chamber of Commerce is developing a website to help meeting planners interested in Iqaluit and the rest of the Baffin Region determine which communities are capable of hosting their event.

Nunavut Tourism hopes to increase the territory’s visibility as a conference destination at trade shows. But the cost of getting to the territory isn’t cheap, admits Nunavut Tourism marketing officer Ailsa Lapp. “Nunavut is remote from the rest of Canada so the cost of travel and other logistics are higher than other locations,” she notes. ‘Weather can also be unpredictable for travel.” Nonetheless, it hosted the G-7 Summit in Iqaluit in February 2010. The Canadian Chamber of Commerce and the Canadian Association of Municipalities have also booked meetings.

Inuvik’s Larry Peckford says the high degree of interest in the North among Canadians makes this the best time to sell the region as a venue for meetings and conferences – especially those about the North. “There’s a lot of reasons to have conversations about Northern issues in the North,” he says. For example, delegates could drive the ice road or fly over the Beaufort Delta to see environmental conditions in Tuktoyaktuk. “There was an Arctic conference in Houston, Texas this spring,” he says. “That was one that was hard for me to get my head around.”

The North’s rugged beauty and the opportunity to participate in such activities as dog sledding, aurora viewing, fishing, and glacier tours and to experience Aboriginal cultures are the very qualities that don’t scream ‘conference destination’ to meeting planners. Yet they are also one of its defining advantages over other destinations. “This is the North’s biggest strength,” Bruce says. “It’s with those activities where the North has so much potential.”

It can offer these activities as part of attractive in-conference tours or as add-ons for delegates who are spending extra time in the North before or after their meeting. Those who choose to marry business with pleasure don’t necessarily come alone, either. “One of the trends when we get meetings up here is that we see a lot more delegates booking early to come see the city and bring their families than if you held it in Vancouver or Toronto,” Bruce says. “They view it as their one chance to get up here.” Hennigar agrees. The uniqueness of the Yukon tends to attract more delegates to a conference as well as their families. “A lot of people come to Yukon for the experience of a lifetime.”

Sometimes the economic spinoffs can last longer than the conference. Green says a number of delegates who attended the learning disabilities conference plan to come back to the Yukon on holidays. Ultimately, meetings and conferences are an opportunity to diversify the Northern economy and to demonstrate that the North’s attributes are far more than skin deep.