Destination leaders face a tough balancing act.
City officials expect steady increases in visitor volume. Residents question how those crowds affect their daily lives. Marketing teams simply want to fill hotel rooms during the slow winter months.
Solving these structural issues requires a different approach to travel and tourism marketing.
A successful destination marketing organization (DMO) acts as a community steward first. When a DMO prioritizes the health of local businesses and the well-being of its residents, it builds a foundation that naturally attracts high-value travelers.
Megan Knott puts this philosophy into practice. As the CEO of Tourism Kingston, she manages the challenge of promoting Canada’s first capital to modern audiences while keeping her focus on the people who live there. Her team builds honest relationships with cultural leaders, uses real-time mobile data to track local economic impact and designs programming that supports the local economy year-round.
We spoke with Knott about her strategy for moving past surface-level metrics to build a truly community-centric tourism model.
How do you coordinate with city departments to maintain a unified brand for Kingston?
The Kingston brand is based on authenticity: we don’t rely on slogans or catchphrases to tell the story of the community. That makes it easy for different partners to take the brand assets and make them their own, to amplify their version of the brand, whether it is for destination marketing or economic development. We spend a lot of time developing our photo and video assets, both for our own work and for our partners’ use. We recruit local residents in our photoshoots—never using models or stock photos—as part of the authentic Kingston message. Our residents are the ambassadors for the city.
Beyond the unified brand, we also work with key municipal and economic development partners, among others, to develop strategies for the community, like our Integrated Destination Strategy, which provides a roadmap for where we want to go as a community over the next three to five years. Consulting with partners, getting different perspectives on mutual goals and identifying key players in major projects, is all key to speaking with one voice for the benefit of the community.
How do you handle pressure for high volume tourism while focusing on local stewardship?
In a strange way, the COVID pandemic taught everyone in the tourism sector patience and perseverance and the importance of supporting each other, as we saw visitor numbers drop.
What we have been able to communicate in our community is that a specific number of tourists, while a good benchmark, is not our end goal. Our goal is the health of our community, the health of our tourism businesses and steady employment for our residents. One of the ways we did that, both during the pandemic and now, is to encourage people to be tourists in their own city, to order from local restaurants and shop from local stores. Understanding that our work is focused on the community’s health takes a little of that pressure off, as we continue to work with our tourism partners to create meaningful and sustainable experiences that benefit the visitor and the community.
We also talk publicly about the impact of external factors on visitor numbers and community prosperity, as well as the impact of tourism on the health of the community. For instance, the city’s investment in upgrading a community baseball field allowed us to host the Canadian Little League Championships, for two years running (so far). These events brought hundreds of athletes, coaches and families to our community, where they also frequented local museums, shops and restaurants.
How do you market a historic city while keeping the energy fresh for younger visitors and residents?
For several years, we actually didn’t lean on the ‘Canada’s first capital’ as a draw for visitors. We wanted to show visitors what it is like to experience Kingston today: its restaurants, its music, its waterfront, in addition to its history. It’s only in the last year or two with the increase in demand for Canadians to explore their own country’s history that this has re-emerged as a draw for visitors.
What we have always done is focus on vibrant, unique activities in a historic setting. Kingston has a long history of being home to creative people, including scholars, artists, writers and musicians. As our brand guidelines state, we’re an old city filled with new ideas.
What steps do you take to make sure cultural storytelling remains respectful and collaborative?
We draw upon our community connections to find partnerships that click. In the case of our brand video (embedded above), we worked closely with Armand Garnet Ruffo, a celebrated poet and a local professor of English and scholar in Indigenous literature. We commissioned him to write a poem, which in turn, inspired the video. As with all our projects, we relied on the authentic relationships we have in the community with local creators.
What is your strategy for turning one-time visitors into long-term ambassadors for Kingston?
We know our community’s strengths that draw visitors. They include our unique geography, a vibrant culinary community, a walkable historic downtown and a dynamic creative scene. Our digital marketing channels highlight how visitors can explore the best of our community and experience it like locals do.
We’re also cognizant of the value of visitors as ambassadors; we market a range of authentic local experiences to a variety of visitors, from conference delegates to cruise ship passengers to educational tour participants. We know that each individual and group has the potential to become a repeat visitor, and a proponent of tourism to our city.
We’ve created products like the Creative Kingston Walking Tours, which are self-guided walking tours exploring Kingston’s rich literary, film and music communities. These web-based, self-guided tours take visitors to unique sites where they can explore Kingston’s creative communities. The tours include interviews with local authors, musicians and filmmakers, with additional photo and video assets.
How do you help local businesses and visitors participate in meaningful, sustainable tourism?
We have done a lot of work on sustainability and making sure that our efforts are realistic and rooted in local action. These efforts include things like installing a water refill station and a bike repair station at our Visitor Information Centre, promoting low-impact activities like walking and biking, purchasing from local businesses and promoting practical ways to participate in sustainable tourism, both for visitors and for local businesses. For the latter, we promote programs like Ontario By Bike certification, Feast On certification (which shows that a food establishment uses locally and regionally sourced food and beverage products) and the Green Key certification for accommodations.
We also created a partnership with a local charity that focuses on food insecurity, to help accommodations divert excess food from group events to be distributed in the community.
What is your top piece of advice for other DMOs trying to boost mid-week and winter visitation?
One of our most successful programs has been Kingstonlicious, now an annual culinary festival that runs throughout February and March (typically a very slow season for local tourism). This program started in 2021, out of necessity. Due to the pandemic, local restaurants had to shutter their doors for in-person dining.
We approached local restaurants with the idea of developing prix fixe menus for takeout. We promoted the menus and encouraged local residents to support local businesses while enjoying local cuisine. Using takeout orders enabled participating restaurants to keep their kitchens open, as well as anticipate supply and demand through advance orders. In the years since, Kingstonlicious has expanded to include signature events, in which a Kingston chef hosts a visiting chef, and they create a special meal together, often enhanced by live music, wine pairings with a sommelier, live music and other educational and cultural components.
(Editor’s Note: Read Noble’s proprietary research on Shoulder Season Personas to learn how to identify and attract the right visitors during these key cycles.)
How can DMOs use real-time local data to better understand visitation?
The research dashboard is a powerful tool in our data toolbox. It uses privacy-compliant data collected from location-enabled mobile devices. This data is collected when the device enters a geo-fenced area. From this, we can see traffic at specific sites that we have identified, like museums and hotels. We are careful to emphasize that this doesn’t tell us the exact number of visitors (as that number may exceed the number of location-enabled mobile devices), and this number may be the one sought out by skeptical stakeholders. So we will augment this data with other methods if we want to have specific visitor numbers for a specific event.
However, the dashboard can differentiate between local residents and visitors, and tell us where those visitors have traveled from, and how long they spend at different sites. This is truly valuable information, both for us as a DMO and for our community partners. We can show the traffic and the economic impact at specific sites and in the city itself. Providing these numbers specifically for Kingston, its assets and its events, is a tremendously useful way to show the impact of tourism in the community. We still track trends and review data from other sources, such as provincial or national reports, and from sector-specific reports (like national sport tourism reports), but this local dashboard works with our community’s assets and visitor traffic specifically. I see this as a powerful tool that the Kingston community can utilize for future planning and decision-making, as well as for reporting.
Meet Megan Knott
Megan Knott, CEO of Tourism Kingston and proud mom of two daughters, has more than 25 years of experience in leadership and development, strategic marketing, media and public relations and business and fiscal management. She holds an MBA in community economic development and holds credentials as a Certified Destination Management Executive.
Megan led city partners in the creation and funding framework for its now established tourism organizations: a hotel association and the destination management organization. Under Megan’s stewardship, these organizations work collaboratively, along with other municipal and community partners, to deliver on the destination’s Integrated Destination Strategy.
An active member of the Kingston community, Megan has participated on several boards of directors. Under Megan’s leadership, the Kingston brand has been recognized with more than 30 national and international awards since its inception in 2018.
