Chapter 6. Entertainment
Donna Owens
Learning Objectives
- Describe the nature and function of activities and businesses that provide entertainment for tourists in Canada
- Identify tourism entertainment activities by their industry groups
- Identify various types of festivals and events and ways in which these are funded and organized
- Describe the MCIT (meetings, convention, and incentive travel) component and its economic impact
- Review various types of attractions including zoos and botanical gardens
- List components of cultural heritage tourism including museums, galleries, and heritage sites
- List other experiences including sport tourism, agritourism, wine tourism, and culinary tourism
- Identify key industry associations related to the tourism entertainment sector and understand their mandates and the resources they provide
Overview
When a traveller enters Canada, there’s a good chance he or she will be asked at the border, What is the nature of your trip? Whether the answer is for business, leisure, or visiting friends and relatives, there’s a possibility that a traveller will participate in some of the following activities (as listed in the Statistics Canada International Travel Survey):
- Attend a festival or fair, or other cultural events
- Visit a zoo, aquarium, botanical garden, historic site, national park, museum, or art gallery
- Watch sports or participate in gaming
These activities fall under the realm of entertainment as it relates to tourism. Documenting every activity that could be on a tourist’s to-do list would be nearly impossible, for what one traveller would find entertaining, another may not. This chapter focuses on the major components of arts, entertainment, and attractions, including motion pictures, video exhibitions, and wineries, all activities listed under the North American Industry Classification System we learned about in Chapter 1.
Festivals and Events
Festival and Major Events Canada (FAME) released a report in 2009 detailing the economic impacts of the 15 largest festivals and events across Canada, which amounted to $750 million in tourist spending and another $300 million in local operational spending (Enigma Research Consultants, 2009). Let’s take a closer look at this segment of the sector.
Festivals
The International Dictionary of Event Management defines a festival as a “public celebration that conveys, through a kaleidoscope of activities, certain meanings to participants and spectators” (Goldblatt, 2001, p. 78). Other definitions, including those used by the Ontario Trillium Foundation and the European Union, highlight accessibility to the general public and short duration as key elements that define a festival.
Search “festivals in Canada” online and over 54 million results will appear. To define these activities in the context of tourism, we need to consider operations and marketing: in other words, we must answer the questions, Who are these activities aimed at? and Why are they being celebra