Check in to AdventureELEVATE to pick up your badge. All delegates must wear badges to gain access to all sessions and events.
AdventureELEVATE evening welcome reception hosted by Saguenay.
Host Destination
AdventureELEVATE Check-In
Opening welcome from the ATTA
In 2014, an innovative partnership between the Whistler Chamber of Commerce and the University of Victoria’s Gustavson School of Business overhauled Whistler community-wide service strategy. Discover how, in two years, the newly branded “Whistler Experience” program brought science to service, drove increased service scores in-resort and inspired Whistler to become the #1 mountain town in the world for delivering epic experiences.
This keynote will help you think about your own guest service strategy, inspire you to refocus your attention on business-wide efforts that are “customer first” and introduce you to the Whistler Experience core program. Return home ready to reconsider and rethink your customer touch points along the very high touch adventure travel experience.
Keynote Partner
Network during a coffee break with your fellow AdventureELEVATE delegates.
Travel photography abounds and social media makes sharing those photographs easy. Yet new challenges include how to best tap into channels like Instagram and Snapchat, how to select the best photos and what to expect from the effort. Instagram expert for Nat Geo Travel, Dan Westergren, will inspire you with examples of images that have captured the attention of thousands of travel dreamers as well as share campaigns that have taken a selection of photos and told specific stories through social channels. Dan will suggest ideas on ways to use Instagram and Snapchat as part of your digital media distribution strategy and advise on how to best do so with resources around you.
Keynote Partner
Enjoy networking during a standing lunch with your fellow AdventureELEVATE delegates. View Menu.
Lunch Partner
After lunch take a guided 2.2 km walk (about 45 min) or transfer via coach (about 10 min) to La Pulperie. Transfers will be available every 10-15 minutes from the outside of the Theatre Banque Nationale.
Devinci bikes will be onsite at the Pulperie from 1:00-2:30PM Monday, June 6th with 10 demo bikes for delegates to try out and ride on the trails before the concurrent sessions begin at 2:30PM.
Traditional funding mechanisms are often not friendly to adventure travel business models — equity can be questioned and business experience is difficult to prove. So, businesses are learning to get creative. From crowdfunding to community-driven solutions more opportunities exist for small to medium sized business than ever before. Learn about these opportunities as well as the complexities of getting an investor in your business for a cash infusion. This session will cover the opportunities, the risks, and the strategy behind modern day funding options.
As travelers drive mobile innovation through their heavy reliance on phones and tablets during travels, there are also opportunities to engage them pre- and post-trip planning in ways that create personalized services that customers are growing to expect. Ignoring mobile-ready websites for now, this is a session to learn about and be inspired from your travel industry peers who have experimented in the realm of mobile apps. What problem were they solving for their clients? What has been their return on investment? What was their investment? These questions and more will be addressed by three different businesses with different models and customer markets.
Your clients and customers, and perhaps more importantly, your potential clients and customers, have myriad attitudes, preferences, and tendencies toward adventure travel. They have different media habits, online habits, price sensitivity and on and on. They also have different ways they go about finding the right trip for them. How can you and your company learn about these tendencies and then position yourself to play to your strengths with the right audience? Market research is often the first step. In this session, customer insights and analytics professional Scott Friesen will discuss the available tools and techniques and their relative pros and cons in service of helping guide the business decisions that adventure travel companies make every day.
ATTA’s original D.N.A. Happy Hour is a whole new take on making business contacts. Tour operators, travel media, destination professionals, travel advisors, and industry partners — we’re all looking to build business relationships with like-minded people. Come prepared with TWO WORDS (consider a verb or adjective and a noun) to summarize what is unique about your business and you’ll share these in meaningful, fun conversations, with drinks and prizes provided by your hosts, Valais, Switzerland, and ExOfficio.
D.N.A. Event Partners
Enjoy dinner hosted by Tourisme Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean. View Menu.
Dinner Partner and Host Destination
The love of food is universal and the cultural distinctions between one place to another can highlight local people and their traditions, the environment and the economy of the region. During this keynote a panel of experts will discuss the power of the local food and beverage tourism movement –how communities are working to professionalize and ready food-based artisanal companies for tourism and then how it all drives local economies when tour operators incorporate local ingredients, regional recipes, food producers and artisans as a key element of their tours.
Using research done by the ATTA and exploring food tourism trends around the world, learn about some of the challenges and opportunities of featuring food, farmers, chefs and artisans as a key differentiator of your product. Your takeaways will include ideas on how to market itineraries that revolve around “food first tourism” and recommendations on what to consider when building a regional food focus into your itineraries or destination marketing strategy.
Keynote Partners
Network during a coffee break with your fellow AdventureELEVATE delegates.
MediaExchange gives delegates the opportunity to have one-on-one meetings with the adventure media at AdventureELEVATE. Select your top media choices from a group of 15 to 20 adventure travel media professionals (their profiles are available to assist in your selections). The ATTA team will review your selections and arrange meetings based on your requests as well as based on the volume of interest from ELEVATE attendees. The staff will do their best to accommodate as many media requests as possible. By late May the ATTA will notify you of your final appointments. You should expect to receive between three to seven media appointments, lasting between seven to ten minutes each.
MediaExchange Partner
Traditional funding mechanisms are often not friendly to adventure travel business models — equity can be questioned and business experience is difficult to prove. So, businesses are learning to get creative. From crowdfunding to community-driven solutions more opportunities exist for small to medium sized business than ever before. Learn about these opportunities as well as the complexities of getting an investor in your business for a cash infusion. This session will cover the opportunities, the risks, and the strategy behind modern day funding options.
As travelers drive mobile innovation through their heavy reliance on phones and tablets during travels, there are also opportunities to engage them pre- and post-trip planning in ways that create personalized services that customers are growing to expect. Ignoring mobile-ready websites for now, this is a session to learn about and be inspired from your travel industry peers who have experimented in the realm of mobile apps. What problem were they solving for their clients? What has been their return on investment? What was their investment? These questions and more will be addressed by three different businesses with different models and customer markets.
Your clients and customers, and perhaps more importantly, your potential clients and customers, have myriad attitudes, preferences, and tendencies toward adventure travel. They have different media habits, online habits, price sensitivity and on and on. They also have different ways they go about finding the right trip for them. How can you and your company learn about these tendencies and then position yourself to play to your strengths with the right audience? Market research is often the first step. In this session, customer insights and analytics professional Scott Friesen will discuss the available tools and techniques and their relative pros and cons in service of helping guide the business decisions that adventure travel companies make every day.
Enjoy networking during a lunch with your fellow AdventureELEVATE delegates. View Menu.
Lunch Partner
Expanding on the popular session held at last year’s AdventureElevate, this is a hands-on workshop where you can take your dream of becoming a B-corporation to the next level. You will learn how to build a framework for both business and impact success through a deep dive on measurement tools available, such as the B Impact Assessment and case discussion on best practices from companies leading in this space. If you are an owner/operator, marketer or DMO interested in inspiring more stakeholders to create their businesses as a force for good – this session is for you.
Workshop Outcomes:
Examine the global movement of companies using business as a force for good.
Learn how you can measure your company’s social and environmental impacts and can build better practices into your company’s operations from the get-go.
Discover the resources to maintain and improve your company’s value and positive impacts in the world as you scale.
This workshop is led by Paul Bennett, an award-winning writer and co-founder of Context Travel. Context organizes small-group tours for the intellectually curious, led by scholars and experts, in over 30 cultural capitals around the world. A certified B Corporation, Context Travel was named one of the fastest growing American companies in 2011 by Inc Magazine. Passionate about the growing B-Corp movement, Paul has written and lectured widely on sustainable tourism and social entrepreneurship.
From road bikes to fat bikes and e-bikes, biking is big right now. We’re witnessing innovation in bike technology and a dramatic rise in the number of bike trails, cycling routes and overall participation in biking all across North America. What are destinations and tour operators doing to position themselves to capture their share of this growing market segment? In this panel, four experts will share their views on current trends in mountain biking, multi-day biking vacations, community engagement and biking as an economic engine for rural locations. Learn what’s hot, how you can participate in the growth of the biking sector, what mistakes to avoid along the way and what the future might hold for this very exciting Adventure Travel segment.
Session Room Partner
MediaExchange gives delegates the opportunity to have one-on-one meetings with the adventure media at AdventureELEVATE. Select your top media choices from a group of 15 to 20 adventure travel media professionals (their profiles are available to assist in your selections). The ATTA team will review your selections and arrange meetings based on your requests as well as based on the volume of interest from ELEVATE attendees. The staff will do their best to accommodate as many media requests as possible. By late May the ATTA will notify you of your final appointments. You should expect to receive between three to seven media appointments, lasting between seven to ten minutes each.
Travel agents can be a valuable channel for tour operators and destinations hoping to grow sales from North America. In this workshop, travel agents will share insight into their successful sales relationships during round table discussions covering essential partnership expectations plus how suppliers and operators can best prepare agents to match travelers with travel experiences. This interactive environment will encourage dialog and exchange so that tour operators and destinations learn from agents and vice versa. Get ready to move – we’ll encourage groups to rotate frequently to ensure some great relationship-building.
Network during a coffee break with your fellow AdventureELEVATE delegates.
In 2014 Destination Canada (DC) shifted its marketing efforts to storytelling, re-inventing itself from a destination marketing organization to more of a media outlet, creating original content while building great partnerships with publishers and influencers. In this keynote, digital marketing strategist Emmanuelle Legault will share how telling adventure stories has allowed DC to increase its digital footprint in international markets like the US, the UK, Germany, Japan and China. With content sent directly to travelers or by working closely with tour operators, DC has used storytelling to effectively convert new travelers. In this session, learn how DC started taking to heart the Hopi proverb “Those who tell the stories, rule the world.”
Closing plenary and ceremony
Enjoy a free night in Saguenay during your free night. View a list of restaurant recommendations.
About Us
Established in 1990, the Adventure Travel Trade Association is the largest global network of adventure travel leaders. Our community is made up of ~30,000 individual guides, tour operators, lodges, travel advisors, tourism boards, destination marketing and management organizations, outdoor educators, gear companies and travel media who share a belief and commitment to sustainable tourism. The connections and creativity of this vibrant community come together both virtually and in person to create and deliver the solutions that propel our businesses and our communities toward a responsible and profitable future.
