Applying a fresh-eyed view to Northern tourism: new director takes the helm at Northeastern Ontario Tourism.

• Author: Kelly, Lindsay
• Position: NEWS

He may be new to Northern Ontario, but Rod Raycroft is far from a neophyte when it comes to tourism.

His work, and life, has taken him from his hometown of Stittsville, outside of Ottawa, to Austria, where he worked as a travel journalist, to British Columbia, where he headed up the Mount Washington Resort Association, and to the Yukon, where he held managerial positions in marketing and communications with the Yukon government's Department of Tourism and Culture.

He's worked in marketing and publishing, and served in senior communications positions with Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development.

On July 24, Raycroft took over his new role as executive director of Northeastern Ontario Tourism, the non-profit organization that promotes tourism in northeastern Ontario.

"It's a unique area, and we're in the business of economic development," Raycroft said. "We're here to get money flowing into the area, and it's always beneficial to have that money from outside of our area rather than having the money just rotate around inside the region."

Tourism in the northeast faces many of the same challenges as in other regions, he said. Visitor activity is highest in the warmer months, and many operators are left scrambling to figure out how to bolster activity in the shoulder seasons.

Climate change, in particular, is frustrating winter operations--curtailing ski seasons and thwarting snowmobile excursions--but Raycroft sees it as an opportunity to remake the industry into something new.

"How the operators deal with that and how we can help them find the right people for that type of seasonal business, we'll work on that, but we also have to look at how the operators themselves want to run," Raycroft said.

"They don't want to be running a business that's affected by climate change and losing money on it, so we have to look at other ways of getting them to perhaps change their product to suit a different market."

Raycroft points to the Wicka-ninnish Inn, in Tofino, B.C., which has turned winter storm watching into a bustling business, or one destination in Austria, which has eschewed ski excursions for high-end spa experiences, where visitors can luxuriate in 15 types of sauna packages.

"I think the experiential type of travel that we talked about many years ago is coming to the fore in how businesses are changing to meet that dynamic of what people want to do on their trips," Raycroft said.

"It's no longer just enough to be on a cruise ship; it's no...