Membership

There were close to 400 members of Muskoka Tourism at the end of 2005 - an increase of 11% over 2004. In the first quarter of 2006 the organization has further grown its membership by 5%.

Members come from the full spectrum of tourism operators and other related businesses including accommodations; restaurants; attractions; special events, retailers and more.

The more tourism operators who partner with Muskoka Tourism, the more collective marketing dollars that can be brought to bear on attracting visitors to Muskoka.

Recognizing that Muskoka Tourism is at least partially funded by the District of Muskoka, in 2005, the organization began offering any tourism operator in Muskoka a free basic listing on discovermuskoka.ca. However, to access the full range of benefits available from Muskoka Tourism, including cooperative marketing programs, an enhanced membership fee applies.

Visitors Served

In 2005, Muskoka Tourism served close to half a million visitors including those who visited our website. In fact, the total number of visitors served in 2005 was up 23% compared to 2004.

Muskoka Tourism's visitor centers located on Highway 11 and Highway 400 welcomed 80,700 visitors and fulfilled numerous requests for detailed travel information via email and the organization's 1-800 line. By comparison, traffic to Provincial visitor centres was down 12% while visits to Muskoka Tourism centres were up 1% over 2004.

While email inquiries were up 4% in 2005, 1-800 inquiries were down 2%. By comparison, inquiries to 1-800-Ontario (the provincial equivalent) were down 11%. However, fulfillment of detailed travel information by Muskoka Tourism was 9% better than the provinces average based on 1-800 calls.

Media inquiries

Over 200 media inquiries from around the world were handled by Muskoka Tourism in 2005, resulting in numerous stories/interviews in print and on the web, radio and television. These stories had an advertising value equivalent (AVE) of over a million dollars.

Web Stats for Discovermuskoka.ca

Muskoka Tourism's website remains one of its biggest assets. Research shows that the internet is becoming the preferred source of information for travel planning and Muskoka Tourism's state- of-the-art website remains one of the organization's biggest marketing assets

Currently Muskoka Tourism has twelve registered domain names in the .ca and .com realms, while another 5 new domain names with the unique .travel extension have been reserved. Visitors to any of these domains are routed to Muskoka Tourism's primary site: Discovermuskoka.ca. Although transparent to visitors, Muskoka Tourism also provides web hosting services for Savourmuskoka.ca.

In 2005, discovemuskoka.ca has a 32.5% increase in web traffic over 2004, while the Provincial site, Ontariotravel.net decreased 14%. With 14 million hits, 357,000 unique visitors and over 3.27 million page views, discovermuskoka.ca compares favourably with the Provincial web site which has 2 million unique visitors per year.

Further, Muskoka Tourism's website enjoys a great depth of penetration with the average visitor spending 7.5 minutes on the site and viewing an average of 9 page views. Even more importantly, most of the visitor's exit the site, only after viewing a member page.

For the first time in 2005, Muskoka Tourism place a pdf version of its vacation guide on line and the result was astounding. Almost 26,000 Guides were downloaded enabling Muskoka Tourism to extend the reach of its print publication by 25%.

Other Major Programs

Each year Muskoka Tourism delivers a number of core marketing programs which include production and distribution of 100,000 Vacation Guides and Maps; bulk distribution of member brochures to travel planning and info centers throughout North America; referral services, brochure displays and visitor center advertising; staff and media familiarization tours of member facilities; trade shows; media relations; and other ad hoc pay-as-you-go marketing programs such as the Great Fall Drives program, the Savour Muskoka culinary initiative and other print and web advertising.