Canada Tourism Case Study

Canada’s Tourist Industry – From an Economic viewpoint

The lack of targeting and positioning has really affected the country; from 2000 to 2010, Canada's share of total international arrivals decreased from 2.9 percent to 1.7 percent and its share of total international revenues fell from 2.3 percent to 1.7 percent (SOURCE). However, Canada benefited from improved confidence and global economic conditions and its hosting of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralym-pic Winter Games. And in 2013, Canada's overall tourism industry:

• Represented more of Canada’s GDP than agriculture, forestry and fisheries combined

• Generated $84.3 billion in economic activity

• Was responsible for more than $18.2 billion in export revenue despite a growing travel

One positive aspect of the Canadian tourist segments is their ability to bring new money into the community. The segments contribute to sales, profits, jobs, tax revenues, and income in an area(SOURCE). The most direct effects happen within the primary tourism sectors --accommodation, restaurants, transpor-tation, amusements, and retail trade. However, the segments also impose costs on the residents of tourism destinations, such as increased costs of garbage handling and increased costs of maintaining tourist attrac-tions that have been damaged by excess of the carrying capacity and vandalism(SOURCE). One can talk about opportunity cost when discussing the above and concluding on the economic and societal impact. Because when Canada invests in the development of tourism or if they start market themselves more, they rarely consider what the same resources could provide when invested in another industry. Therefore what needs to be researched is “the relative economic benefits of investing in tourism as opposed to investing in another industry”; these are the opportunity costs. In order to measure the opportunity costs, the possibili-ties that have been abandoned when selecting tourism should be cautiously examined, outlined and valued. Because of the difficulty in measuring and seeing these costs, they are often forgotten, consequently leav-ing the economic and societal impacts of tourist segments look more beneficial than they perhaps are (Mathieson and Wall, 1992). However, the Canadian tourist industry is one of the great resources to na-tional growth but some costs are followed. Therefore, the Canadian government must be careful when wanting to grow the tourism industry. Nevertheless, if Canada were to increase international visitation by just 5% to keep pace and follow the global rate of tourist growth, in turn Canada would