nova scotia tourism

From June 4th to June 18th, 2014, a team from the Partnership for Canada-Caribbean Community Climate Change Adaptation (ParCA) travelled to Shelburne County and the Region of Queens Municipality in Nova Scotia. The team was primarily composed of 4 Master’s candidates from the University of Waterloo: Shandel Brown, Saveena Patara, Maliha Majeed and Andrea Minano. Other associates from ParCA were able to attend for parts of the trip, including Dr. Carolyn Brown (University of Prince Edward Island) and Dr. Ahmed Khan (St. Mary’s University).

I’m sure that many tourism business owners have spent a lot of time investigating review sites like Trip Advisor and Yelp, reading up on what their customers are saying. This is good business practice and tourism operators should always have an open ear to any praise or critique.

I’ve made some major alterations to TourSim, both in the data that it relies on, and the types of experimentation it supports. I’m thinking that this is going to make TourSim much more usable for tourism planning, and begins to incorporate many of the ideas of complexity science (such as adaptation) into TourSim.

For quite a while now I’ve been trying to expand the types of adaptive behaviour included in TourSim. Currently the tourists display a type of adaptive behaviour, as they move to destinations that satisfy their preferences. In the Baddeck Hotel Development model, tourists would adapt to the development of a new hotel, as more tourists visited Baddeck because of this new type of accommodation.

I’ve been hard at work adding more realistic element to TourSim.

I’ve added a new scenario to the Tourism Scenarios section. This is the second model, and is a variation on my first model. This model, titled the “Port of Entry Destination Comparison Model”, allows you to compare the effects of varying tourist port of entry on the total visitation to Lunenburg, Baddeck, and Digby. I hope to implement a function to allow you to pick from a greater range of destinations in future versions of the model. Anyways, please check out the model.

I’ve been putting together some sample results using the Baddeck Hotel Development scenario. I ran the model with the default range of accommodations, and then re-ran it with the “Add Hotel at Baddeck” button selected. You can experiment with this same scenario under the Tourism Scenarios tab. Below I’ve added a chart that shows the percentage change in tourist visitation per day (blue bar) and percentage change in income per day (green bar) at select destinations. This shows the difference between the base scenario and the add hotel scenario.

Tourism is an important contributor to the Nova Scotian economy. Estimates put the number of jobs created by tourism at around 33,000, and the dollar value to be over $1.3 billion in 2004.

Developing new tourism attractions and accommodations is a process that can involve benefits and risks. One way to reduce these risks to tourism development is through planning and anticipating certain scenarios.