What's New?

---

2006 Travel Activities and Motivations Survey (TAMS) completed.

The 2006 Travel Activities and Motivations Survey (TAMS) has recently been completed. The TAMS project examines recreational activities and travel habits of Canadians and Americans. The survey examines travel behaviour of the past two years, providing detailed information on travellers’ activities, travel motivators, places visited, type of accommodation used, impressions of Canada, its provinces and territories, demographics and media consumption patterns and helps identify existing and potential travel markets in North America.

TAMS represents a comprehensive assessment of travel behavior and motivators and provides a rich and authoritative database by which to develop marketing strategies and travel products to attract visitors to Canada. In particular, TAMS was designed to:

• Identify existing and potential tourism markets;
• Measure the likelihood of these tourism markets being attracted to vacation experiences in Canadian destinations;
• Create packaging opportunities for each of these markets;
• Determine how to reach these markets (i.e. in terms of communication strategies); and
• Provide information on how to better fine-tune and target existing marketing campaigns.

TAMS was sponsored by the following organizations:

The Ontario Ministry of Tourism The Ontario Tourism Marketing The Canadian Tourism Commission The Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency The Department of Canadian Heritage Parks Canada Statistics Canada

The Quebec Ministry of Tourism Partnership Tourism Manitoba Tourism Saskatchewan Alberta Economic Development Tourism BC The Government of Yukon The Government of Northwest Territories

The survey was conducted in Canada and the United States between January and June 2006. The Canadian survey consisted of a telephone survey and a mailback survey. The mailback was completed by those who had traveled in the past 2 years. The response rates were as follows: telephone= 65.4%, mailback= 53.5%. The U.S. survey consisted of a mailback survey only as it used an existing mail panel. The panel’s response rate for this survey was 71.3%.

The U.S. database consists of 61,000 completes and the Canadian telephone of 53,000 completes of which over 24,700 completed the mailback questionnaire.

In this second wave of TAMS (the first wave was completed in 2000), we’ve adjusted the survey to better meet the needs expressed by our tourism stakeholders. Some of the differences include:

• More detailed questions regarding activities, as well as identifying the activities that were the primary motivators for trips;
• Identification of the travel decision-maker in the family and the process of selecting trip types;
• More detailed questions regarding media habits;
• Additional questions on ethnic/cultural background to identify the country of birth of the parents of the respondents; and
• Ratings of Canadian and foreign jurisdictions as destinations for pleasure travel.
  

We invite you to review the full questionnaire to develop an understanding of what respondents were asked and how their responses might be of use to you.

Look here for the first of the reports, focusing on the U.S. travel, market in the fall of 2006.