February 12, 2018
2017 Year-end Room Sales Increase 12% Over Two Years
Saint John ended 2017 with a 3.9% increase in room sales resulting in a 12% increase since 2015, reports STR, INC., the leading authority on hotel industry performance trends.
“2017 was really a tremendous year for tourism in so many ways. We are fortunate to live in a community of innovators who are elevating the vibrancy of Saint Awesome and creating FOMO (Fear-of-Missing-Out) like we have never seen before,” says Victoria Clarke, Executive Director of Discover Saint John. “Our job at Discover Saint John is to broadcast those messages through our sales and marketing channels to key target markets – getting above the noise and really highlighting our differentiators.”
Discover Saint John’s marketing and sales efforts are focused on consumers, meetings and conventions, sports tourism and travel trade ensuring Saint John is the preferred year-round destination.
In 2017 alone, Discover Saint John’s sales teams secured $9.4M in future business for the city, according to Clarke. “Meetings and conventions and sporting events utilize city facilities and infrastructure, fill restaurants, shops and keep our city busy 12 months of the year.”
Saint John has also seen hotel revenues grow 18% over the past two years as reported by STR, INC. This increase is the culmination of the local market rebounding and the strategic leadership in Saint John to implement a destination marketing fee, says Paulette Hicks, President of the Saint John Hotel Association.
“The revenue growth our local hotel industry has been experiencing since Discover Saint John’s inception, in particular the past couple years, is validation of our strategic investment in a public-private destination marketing organization,” says Hicks. “Innovative and deliberate marketing and sales programs are driving awareness of the destination and converting into room nights.”
Discover Saint John is expecting to receive final overall visitation numbers for 2017 this spring.
“Each year, Saint John welcomes approximately 1.6 million visitors and collectively they spend over $250M dollars annually,” says Clarke. “This is new money for our region and it helps employ people not only in the accommodations sector but also in the food and beverage, retail, and transportation sectors”.
As one of the region’s top employment sectors, tourism is now outpacing fishing, mining and agriculture combined for employment in New Brunswick and according to the 2006 Census Data approximately 10% of the labour force within the Fundy Region is directly employed in the tourism sector.
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About Discover Saint John:
Discover Saint John is a not-for-profit public-private corporation with the mandate to increase tourism revenues in Saint John by marketing the city’s unique and competitive tourism experiences to high-potential markets.
In addition to tourism promotion, Discover Saint John provides staff and management directly for the city’s visitor information centres.
Discover Saint John is governed by an 11-member board of directors with 5 appointees from the City of Saint John, 2 members of the Saint John Hotel Association, and 4 members appointed as industry representatives.
Media Contacts:
Victoria Clarke
Executive Director, Discover Saint John
(506)658-2990
Paulette Hicks
President, Saint John Hotel Association
(506) 648-1657