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 Travel & Outdoors | December 2007 
The Gold at the End of the Rainbow
 Paul Luke - The Vancouver Province
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| | Greg Auseth and John Gabriel won a contest that brought them from Minneapolis to Vancouver to get married. |
Why B.C.'s tourism sector sees big bucks in attracting gay and lesbian tourists
Like many gay boomers, Greg Auseth has itchy feet. His thirst for travel takes him more places around the globe than your envious heart can stand.
But of all the cities he has visited, none has embraced Auseth with the same degree of shrewd passion as Vancouver showed last year.
Auseth, a commercial photographer from Minneapolis, won a gay- wedding contest co-ordinated by Tourism Vancouver that brought him and his partner to Vancouver to tie the knot.
The $50,000 prize included a wedding in Queen Elizabeth Park, airfare and accommodation for the grooms and eight guests and a honeymoon cruise to Alaska.
"Everyone, from our straight parents to our gay friends, was blown away by Vancouver," Auseth, 45, says. "I'd been there before, for Expo 86, but it was so much better than I remembered."
The wedding contest was a centrepiece of Tourism Vancouver's campaign to roll out the pink carpet for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered travellers - collectively called the LGBT market.
Competition among the world's cities is heating up for LGBTers - an affluent group coveted for its high-spending ways.
"It's a dream market," says Angus Praught, owner of Gayvan.com Travel Marketing.
"They have a lot of disposable income and they can afford to travel more frequently and use mid-to-high-end products."
Candice Gibson, Tourism Vancouver's manager of consumer marketing, says gay travellers often travel in off-season. With fewer dependants, they are less tied to the school calendar.
"It's a very loyal market, and I would say it's also more resistant to some of the tourist-market shocks we've seen in the past several years," Gibson says.
Fifteen years ago, only four or five global destinations courted gay travellers, says Praught, who acts as Tourism Vancouver's liaison for the LGBT market. Today, the list of gay-wooing destinations has soared to about 75.
Vancouver's pink push appears to be paying off.
The city has just been named Canada's most visited gay-and-
lesbian travel destination for the second consecutive year, edging out Montreal and Toronto.
In its annual survey, research firm Community Marketing Inc. also ranked Vancouver as the fourth most visited international destination. The city keeps high-falutin' company - London took the top spot, followed by Puerto Vallarta and Paris.
The survey shows that Vancouver has stolen the hearts of lesbian tourists. The city was the most visited international destination for lesbian boomers, seniors and Generation Yers, and the second most visited for Gen Xers.
"That's amazing," says Jerry McHugh, senior research director for San Francisco-based Community Marketing.
"What pushed Vancouver into fourth overall position was really the lesbians."
The city is not about to get complacent about promoting itself to LGBTers, says Caryl Dolinko, president of Smart Cookie Consulting and a Vancouver Pride Society consultant.
Vancouver has landed two prestigious gay conventions in 2008.
The InterPride Conference, which Dolinko co-chairs, will attract about 300 delegates next October. InterPride is an umbrella group for Pride events and groups across the world.
Also next October, Vancouver hosts Community Marketing's annual conference, which will attract about 200 international delegates.
Dolinko and other gay community leaders have formed a steering committee to discuss making a Vancouver bid for the 2011 North America Outgames and human-rights conference.
In the meantime, Whistler hosts the WinterPRIDE festival - formerly known as gay ski week - in February.
Attendance is expected to grow to as many as 3,500 in 2008 from 2,500 a year earlier, WinterPRIDE spokesman Dean Nelson says.
"We were a bit nervous about the U.S. dollar, but our early numbers so far are showing we have a strong pull from the U.S.," he says.
Next summer also marks the 30th anniversary of Vancouver's annual gay Pride parade and festival. This year's Pride event drew about 400,000 attendees, injecting an estimated $66 million into the local economy.
To sustain the city's gay market momentum, McHugh says Vancouver businesses must be demonstrably gay-friendly. Gay travellers want nothing to do with lip service.
"There's a lot of pink-washing out there where companies will run some ads, and it sometimes works in the short term, but eventually people figure out it's just a coat of paint," he says.
It's also important for the local industry to track the market's evolution, he says.
The gay market is far from monolithic - it includes many age, career, economic, gender and racial sub-markets, he says.
The last thing these sub-markets want to see is advertising images targeted exclusively at sleek gay white men in their 30s.
In the past, marketers have likely been reaching only gay males, or half the LGBT market, with their campaigns, he says.
Many gay boomers and seniors are interested in destinations offering the safe familiarity of like-minded communities, he says.
But gay Gen-Xers and Gen-Yers are more interested in immersing themselves in the whole, diverse community.
"You have to develop marketing that's inclusive, which very few destinations have been able to do," says McHugh.
Dolinko says Vancouver offers the best of many worlds - adventure travel, spas, fine dining and the gay neighbourhood of Davie village within a secure urban context.
"In Vancouver, you feel you can walk hand in hand with your partner down the street," she says.
"That's a wonderful feeling, and there are only a handful of cities in the world where you can do that."
pluke(at)png.canwest.com
RICH PASSPORT-HOLDERS
Last year, the Vancouver area had 8.7 million visitors. By a conservative estimate, gays accounted for 435,000 of these visitors.
Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered tourists account for five to 10 per cent of North America's travel pie. Eighty per cent of gay men and 70 per cent of lesbians hold a passport, compared with 24 to 30 per cent of overall U.S. adults, according to Community Marketing Inc. At $130,000 US, gay couples have a median household income that's 80 per cent higher than the overall U.S. median. |
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