';
Skip to Navigation Skip to Content

Tourism Vancouver Island

Stakeholders

Community Tourism Opportunities

 

Tourism Vancouver Island is pleased to introduce the new
Community Tourism Opportunities Program

Launched in 2008, the Community Tourism Opportunities (CTO) program provides co-operative funding for eligible tourism activities in communities throughout BC. In excess of $1 million in support funding will be available annually throughout the Province through the CTO program, and distribution among regions will vary according to specific community needs.

The Community Tourism Opportunities (CTO) program:

  • Is delivered on behalf of Tourism British Columbia (TBC) by Tourism Vancouver Island.
  • Replaces and expands upon the Community Tourism Foundations® Program (CTF) Implementation Phase. The CTF program is now focused exclusively on Destination Development.
  • Provides opportunities for communities to assist TBC and Tourism Vancouver Island in achieving industry strategic objectives that will be available year-to-year.
    • Provides tangible community benefits such as:
    • providing detailed web content
    • product inventories
    • operator web listings
    • imagery
    • media & trade familiarization tour support, etc.
  • Provides greater inclusiveness and flexibility.

Tourism Vancouver Island is responsible for reviewing community proposals within the Vancouver Island Region, making recommendations to Tourism BC. To be eligible for funding support, CTO project proposals must contain new or enhanced elements compared to the community’s existing activities and a strategy to evaluate the effectiveness of the CTO investment in these incremental activities must be defined.

The Region starts the annual process of developing community proposals by meeting with a community’s tourism planning committee, and their community Destination Marketing Organization, where one is in place, to develop an annual inventory of community tourism objectives, resources and challenges, factoring in the needs of the Region and Tourism BC relative to each community.

Tourism BC evaluates community proposals and allocates CTO funds on the basis of recommendations from the Regions, existing Community Tourism Foundations commitments and demonstrated need in the absence of practical alternatives, project relevance to provincial objectives, past performance by the community, and measurable project effectiveness.

For more information on this new opportunity please contact:

Merv Jefferies
Industry Services Coordinator
Phone: 250-754-3500 ext 317
Fax: 250-754-3599