Project Profile

Resort Community Collaborative
Working in concert to track tourism development progress

PROJECT SNAPSHOT

Clients: The Resort Municipality of Whistler and subsequently twelve other resort communities in British Columbia including: Golden, Radium Hot Springs, Invermere, Fernie, Kimberley, Rossland, Revelstoke, Valemount, Osoyoos, Harrison Hot Springs, Tofino, and Ucluelet.

Key Deliverable: A comparable monitoring and reporting system, along with a reporting tool that tracks tourism development and hotel tax funded project outcomes in the thirteen resort communities.

Our Role: The Whistler Centre for Sustainability has developed experience in helping tourism communities reveal priorities for a successful vibrant future and how to measure progress toward or away from these priorities. This experience pairs well with the challenges the collaborative communities face in tracking their progress and evaluating successful hotel tax project spending.  More specifically, we are working with the collaborative to develop a common strategy for evaluating tourism success and the benefits of the provincial hotel tax sharing program in each community. Beyond researching community monitoring and reporting needs and developing the monitoring framework for the communities, we are managing the collection and analysis of community data and coaching resort communities in their efforts to enhance tourism performance tracking.

Timeline: 2007 to June 2010

PROJECT DETAILS

The British Columbia Resort Municipality Initiative (RMI) entails a revenue-sharing (tax transfer) program that provides eligible tourism-based communities with a portion of the provincial hotel room tax to be used for local investments in tourism infrastructure, amenities, and programs.  This initiative is designed to reward success by linking increased tourism revenues to increased funding for local resort community development and enhancement projects.

Resort communities are required to demonstrate the results achieved through the tax transfer, by annually reporting on measures that reflect the effective use of hotel tax transfer funds on resort community development initiatives.  Resort communities that participate in the revenue-sharing program need to demonstrate success in achieving the key outcomes in order for tax transfers to continue into the future. The collaborative also tracks common performance relating to the social and environmental goals that are important to each community

After surveying the thirteen resort municipalities about their experience with and resource allocation to program reporting and monitoring, we developed some principles to help define what a common monitoring and reporting system might look like. One of the key principles was ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’. This principle reflected our understanding that each community was at a different stage of reporting with varying levels of resources. Ultimately each community is choosing their own monitoring approach, but each approach whether resource intensive or not, was established based on a common guiding framework. Since receiving unanimous support to move forward on a common monitoring and reporting program in September 2009, we’ve been building a data entry and analysis tool and guidebook to help communities assume responsibility for monitoring from us after the first year.  Further, we are in the process of developing industry and academic contacts to support the communities with their monitoring.

Collaborating to develop and maintain a standardized or common monitoring program between the communities participating in the Resort Community Collaborative will realize collective benefits, including: improved cost efficiency; strengthened relationships; knowledge/technology transfer; and greater reporting impact to funders.

Each community designated a contact to carry this work forward in 2010 and community reports were presented in June 2010. Our work with the Collaborative continues.

In short, we are helping the resort community partners understand what their residents value, how to articulate these priorities and ultimately how to track and report progress to know how well they are performing. We can do the same for your community.

Related Links:

British Columbia Resort Municipality Initiative (RMI)