A seemingly harmless franchise fight between the owners of the Quality Inn Vancouver Hotel and Quality Inn (the brand) has spiralled out of control into a giant consumer mess for travelers who booked rooms for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics and got left high and dry.

Vancouver 2010 Olympics

On October 16, the 100 room airport hotel – formerly known as the Blue Boy Motor Hotel – lost the right to be a part of the Quality Inn brand. 

Consumers who made reservations at the hotel months ago through Choice Hotels International – the parent company which owns the Quality Inn brand – were informed that their reservations were no longer valid.

A consumer who booked a room for $79 now faces the prospect of booking similar rooms at shockingly high prices. The hotel owner is offering to rebook the same room for $500. Choice is offering to rebook at one of its other Vancouver hotels for $395 a night.

In short, anyone who booked a room at the hotel through Choice now has to fork over an additional $300 over, if they want a room for the Olympics.

A Choice Hotels spokesman told the Vancouver Sun that “Choice Hotels cannot force a hotel that no longer holds a franchise to honour the room rates guaranteed by its booking agents.”

That may be true, but the question now is, can these consumers force Choice to honor the room rates? There’s already talk of a class-action lawsuit. And it doesn’t make Vancouver look so good either. If this escalates into a full-fledged media uproar, then Choice will have to give in quickly to contain the damage.

Photo by Andy Miah

Hosting the Olympics isn’t exactly all that its made out to be, in terms of visitors and tourism. Turns out that Vancouver and Whistler are suffering from something known as the ‘Olympic Avoidance Effect.’

The Westin Resort & Spa in Whistler

Hotel occupancy rates have tanked in Whistler and Vancouver in advance of the games, with year on year rates down by as much as 9.5%. The Westin Resort & Spa in Whistler is struggling to overcome a measly 10% occupancy rate, as of last week.

The drop in visitors is mostly attributed to American travelers hesitant to cross the border for fear of getting caught up in the bedlam and construction of the preparations for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics.

With a woeful occupancy rate months ahead of the games, and the virtual certainity of an even bigger drop after the games, the only way the hotels in Vancouver and Whistler could have made up for the loss would have been high prices and occupancy during the Olympics. The occupancy they have, the prices not so much.

VANOC – the Olympic organizing committee, has a pact in place with most hotels under which they have all agreed to limit rates for Olympic visitors. To make matters worse, some of the hotels in Vancouver, who didn’t sign on to the pact, have gone rogue and are now fleecing travelers for as much as possible.

One of these hotels is The Robsonstrasse in downtown Vancouver. This hotel, which usually calls itself a discount hotel, is charging as much as $1200 for a suite which normally goes for $280, according to an article in the Globe & Mail. Media reports about how hard it is to get hotel rooms and the steep prices mentioned ($450 to $700) have turned off non-Olympic visitors well in advance of the games.

To clarify – these rates are only for the duration of the games (Feb 12-28, 2010), and mostly because all the cheap rooms have already been booked for these dates. But the stories add to the perception of chaos and price gouging, which non-Olympic travelers don’t want to get mixed up in.

End game – Other the high occupancy for the duration, the Olympic Games have created more problems than revenue for area hotels.

Westin Photo courtesy Starwood Hotels & Resorts

Related posts:-
Olympic Spat – Quality Inn Vancouver Franchise Fight
The Olympic Effect – Chicago Lost, but Chicago Tourism Strikes Gold

On Feb 16, 2010, faculty members of Vancouver Island University’s tourism dept. will engage in an interesting debate - Are the Olympic Games worth the high price tag to British Columbians?

Intervistas 2010 Olympic tourism forecast

The answer can easily be found in the fact that it’s only been hours since the 2010 Winter Olympics got underway in Vancouver, but Canada has already kicked off a push to prop up post-Olympic tourism.

That would be because the price tag for the Olympics stands at $6 billion, while revised tourism forecasts now put the economic impact of the games at between $2 billion to $2.4 billion for the period in between 2008 and 2015.

A  jump in BC tourism in the 2 years leading up to the Games, forecasted by an Intervistas economic impact report which was used to justify the massive spending, never came true. In fact, BC Tourism has actually dropped and is now below levels recorded 5 years ago.

On the plus side of the debate, the $6 billion price tag includes long-term infrastructure projects such as the Canada Line, the expansion of the Vancouver Convention Center and Sea to Sky Highway improvements. The Canadian Tourism Commission is hoping the 3 billion strong audience for the Olympic Games provides an opportunity for a 17 day advertisement to brand Canada as a destination, and has set itself up for a 30% boost in tourism reciepts -$100 billion between next year and 2015.

But there’s probably more than a little bit of fear among officials that its not going to pan out as they’re hoping it will. It would explain why the government is folding the Crown Corporation in charge of BC Tourism, and handing over the tourism management to a government ministry.

It would also be the reason that BC is running a $38 million ‘follow-up’ North American tourism ad campaign featuring celebrities such as Sarah McLachlan, Michael J. Fox, and Kim Cattrall, among others. Here’s the ad on youtube.

BC Tourism Minister Kevin Krueger explains that the additional ad spending is because past Olympic hosts have complained of not getting the expected economic boost in the post-Olympic period, and BC didn’t want to be in the same boat.

Vancouver Tourism president Rick Antonson is literally doing the selling in a daily video blog directed at the meetings industry. He touts Vancouver’s new Convention Center which is three times as big, and also offers a behind the scenes view of how Vancouver deals with problems and issues associated with hosting and managing large events. 

You can see the videos at www.meetingsvancouver.com. They’re sending emails with links to the daily video to Meetings Associations in the U.S.

Is all this going to be enough to give BC and Vancouver a significant edge in tourism and branding to offset the Olympic Games’ price tag? If you go by past history, not a single Olympic Games todate has shown a net profit, taking into consideration the federal investment in infrastructure.

Related Posts:-
Olympic Avoidance Effect – Tourism Tanks in Whistler & Vancouver
The Olympic Effect – Chicago Lost, but Chicago Tourism Strikes Gold

The town of Vancouver in Washington state has long been overshadowed by its more famous namesake in British Columbia, Canada. The recently concluded Olympics in Vancouver, BC brought this matter to a head, with Vancouver, Wa. getting many mistaken queries from visitors looking for the Olympic town. 

Vancouver, Washington, USA

As a result, Vancouver Wa. has finally decided to do something about it. But instead of giving up and changing their name, the Washington town is apparently hoping to steal it back.

They’re now pushing Vancouver as Vancouver USA, with a new slogan – ‘Visit Vancouver USA, Discover the Original.’ Their tourism bureau has also been renamed, and is now known as the Vancouver USA Regional Tourism Office.

The old Southwest Washington Convention and Visitors Bureau website now redirects to www.visitvancouverusa.com/.

Is all this this supposed to make some big difference? Maybe a few hapless tourists looking for the Canadian town will stop bothering Vancouver USA.

But as far as branding for tourism purposes is concerned, its not going to make it any easier. Vancouver BC will still hog all the search rankings for Vancouver and related queries.

Vancouver Wa. did at one time consider renaming itself to Fort Vancouver, which would have been far easier to brand than Vancouver USA. 

That said, Vancouver isn’t the first town to trip over search engine rankings, when it comes to similarly named towns and places.

The 1000 yr old French town of Eu in Normandy, France racked its brains trying to get some tourism traffic to its website, but always found itself blocked by the European Union. They’re now in the process of getting a new name with additional syllables in front of the Eu.

But in the case of Vancouver USA, there is no name change. With the Olympics over and done with, there was no pressing need to clear the confusion, and this rebranding sans name change doesn’t really look like its going to help Vancouver USA gain a separate identity and more visitors.

Photo by icantdothat

On June 15, 2011, riots broke out in downtown Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada, after the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup to the Boston Bruins. At least 140 people and nine police officers were injured in the riots, and 117 people were arrested during and afterward.

Vancouver Stanley Cup riots

It’s kind of a big deal because Canadians are perceived to be a very nice and polite society which looks down on its brash neighbors south of the border.

So there’s a worry that this riot will change peoples’ perceptions not just about Vancouver, but Canada and Canadians in general.

Jimmy Kimmel hit a raw nerve with a section on his show (see video) where he says “I like angry Canada…It makes me feel less bad about our behavior.”

Kimmel then played a fake Canada tourism ad, which shows video footage of the riot with a narrator saying, “Canada… Where the people aren’t nice anymore.”

On the other hand, there has been an outpouring of emotion and love for Vancouver from the locals, who turned up to clean the streets and scrawl their thoughts and regrets about the riots on downtown storefronts.

This is where Tourism Vancouver comes into the picture, with a new online platform (www.thisisourvancouver.com/) for channeling these emotions and allowing people to share the pictures and videos online.

Vancouver Stanley Cup riots message

“Last Wednesday Vancouver was reeling from a blindside,” said Tourism Vancouver president and CEO Rick Antonson. “Today, Vancouver’s integrity shines again. ‘This Is Our Vancouver.com’ is our way of helping the world know that Vancouver’s greatest asset is its people.”

The site, set up by Tourism Vancouver and its creative agency DDB Canada; plenty of users have posted items and photos directly connected to the riots.

“As a creative agency, our world is about harnessing emotion. We mobilize people around sentiments that hold real meaning for them,”  explains Lance Saunders, executive vice president and managing director of DDB Canada’s Vancouver office. “This is about celebrating Vancouver and restoring its image to where it deserves to be.”

It’s also, clearly, a good opportunity to kick-start a social media aggregation site where citizens and visitors can share their thoughts and media about the “real” Vancouver, on an ongoing basis.

Photos: Elopde; Clayton Perry

Related posts:
City Art in Vancouver: Eagles Aflight
Canada Tourism Puts Up Twitter Walls in U.S. Cities
Identity Crisis for Vancouver USA