Tourism Winnipeg

Mike Peters Tourism Winnipeg highlights Tourism Winnipeg (TW) is the city's official destination marketing organization and leads all efforts to attract visitors, group tours, special events, sports, meetings and conventions to Winnipeg. TW highlights the city's star attractions, festivals, events, arts, culture, restaurants and services to provide residents and visitors the best possible experience. For much of 2021, our team continued business development and visitor experiences via virtual platforms. TW supported partners, their clients and the industry while developing strategies to assist in recovery efforts for a fragile tourism economy. Re-booking events Since the onset of the pandemic, TW's priority has been to assist partners and clients in rebooking events that were scheduled to be held in Winnipeg. Since then, of the 188 events affected, TW has worked diligently and strategically with all stakeholders to reschedule nearly 45 per cent of these events into future years, with two-thirds of these confirmed and signed by the end of 2021. Virtual conferences, site visits & familiarization tours Tourism Winnipeg participated in various virtual conferences and events that presented opportunities to showcase Winnipeg's product offering and remain top of mind to drive future business events and maintain long-standing relationships. National and international travel trade and sports marketplaces such as Rendezvous Canada, Bienvenue Quebec and Sports Events Congress provided a virtual platform for B2B meetings to build the pipeline for future opportunities for Canadian travel and sports groups. Business development & marketing consortiums Tourism Winnipeg led the management of the marketing consortiums of Team Winnipeg and Winnipeg Tour Connection to drive client engagement and develop the tourism economy. These consortiums brought together more than 60 stakeholders that maximized resources, provided cohesive business development efforts and allowed us to maintain awareness for Winnipeg as a destination of future consideration for groups and business events. Return to market activities Tourism Winnipeg returned to in-person events during the latter part of 2021. We worked with Destination Canada to host various familiarization tours and created site visits for all markets. Also key to these high-impact initiatives were Toronto sales missions for the travel trade and business events in the international marketplace. Group travel trade The reopening of the U.S. border in 2021 saw the return of international visitation to Northern Manitoba and return of several tour groups. We developed several new Winnipeg tour programs and conducted destination presentations for the product and sales staff of Canadian tour companies that have shifted their focus to promoting domestic travel. The city's major attractions were featured as ideal travel motivators for student youth groups, with an emphasis on social science, history and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programs. 22 2021 ANNUAL REPORT

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