Glen Korstrom
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Nov 12/99) - Though people in Japan view Yellowknife as the No. 1 place in the world to view Northern lights, competition is growing from other parts of the world.

RWED's director of parks and tourism, Robin Reilly, brought this message back to Yellowknife from a recent trip to Japan.

Reilly went to Japan Oct. 17-23 for an event called Kanata '99 along with Lona Collins from NWT Arctic Tourism, Raven Tours owner Bill Tait and some Raven Tours staff.

This was the 10th Kanata event and included meetings with Japanese buyers of tour packages who would then resell the packages to consumers.

Reilly said many countries tour companies are adding additional glitzy bonuses to try to catch tourist interest, which is something Yellowknife businesses could think about.

For example, in Finland, Reilly said there are not only discount airfares but they have also built a Santa Claus village complete with ice castles.

"You can go to Finland and sleep in a hotel that's made of ice. You sleep on fur on a bed that's made of ice," Reilly said.

"They're really doing lots of innovative things and aggressively saying, 'Come to us for your winter experience.'"

Reilly said several tourist brochures are readily available at any of Tokyo's train stations.

"Walking through the train station you can pick up brochures on aurora tours from Finland, Alaska or Churchill. There are a whole whack of imitators now," he said.

To compete, he said that RWED has recently completed the translation of the first government-funded travel brochure in Japanese.

Reilly terms the brochure as a "lure" brochure because it acquaints people with what is available and shows the North to be an interesting place to visit, but does not give tour package costs.

It cost RWED $2,000 to produce about 5,000 of the brochures.

During the trip, Reilly and the other trip participants met with several major tourism companies in Tokyo and Osaka.

Some, such as the Japan Travel Bureau, were large enough to sell Canadian tours to 380,000 Japanese people last year.

Reilly estimated the number of Japanese visitors to the North as a whole at between 6,000 and 7,000 people a year.

"We don't have an exact number on every single body but Yellowknife is certainly the lion's share of that, maybe about 6,000."

Reilly estimated that eight years ago there may have only been 500 Japanese visitors to Yellowknife in a year.

"They don't tend to travel to a whole bunch of different destinations. They tend to be pretty routine," Reilly said of the typical Japanese tourist.

"They go to Banff, they go to Whistler and maybe Niagara Falls. About 90 per cent of them go to the same six destinations. Probably one of the newest destinations to join that club is Yellowknife and the Aurora tours."

The Canadian Embassy and the Canadian Tourism Commission organized the trip.

During the Kanata '99 conference, the NWT representatives hosted a dinner to mark the 10th anniversary of the event.

"We had a video, a slide show and contests so we had a bigger than normal presence," Reilly said.

"We also talked about there being new diamond mines and furs that people could buy."