Tourisme Intelligence
THE Quebec source for information on global trends in tourism

Tags: adventure, eco-tourism, Quebec, region, Sustainable tourism, wildlife-observation

Whale watching is still the fastest growing sector of general wildlife tourism worldwide and this is important for Québec, since marine tourism is a lucrative activity. According to a recent report, 13 million people went whale watching in 119 countries in 2008, compared to 9 million in 87 countries in 1998.(1) In the past 10 [...]

Tags: air-canada, convention, environment, events, Greenhouse-effect, hotels, Sustainable tourism, train, transat, Transportation

Visitors to and from Québec contribute to Greenhouse Gas emissions (GHG), regardless of the mode of transport, distance traveled, or the activity undertaken during a stay. To date, no study assessed neither travelers’ nor the tourism sector’s contributions to GHG emissions, or attitudes or actions towards mitigation in Québec. This creates a knowledge gap about [...]

Tags: airlines, crisis, cruises, economy, hotels, United-States

Stormy Skies on the Horizon The global economy has fallen off a cliff and no one is sure when it will hit bottom. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the world’s advanced economies experienced an unprecedented 7.5% decline in real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) during the fourth quarter of 2008. The IMF projects a [...]

Tags: classifications, eco-tourism, environment, governance, Greenhouse-effect, hotels, Quebec, tourism development

The need to develop tourism based on sustainability principles is a part of a general tourism policy framework since 2005 in Québec(1) and most tourism sub-sectors also have set broad objectives based on this basis, including the Ski-doo Federation (2). Although sustainability is well accepted across Québec’s tourism sector, in practice it is not a [...]

The number of certified green hotels continues to grow, but the eco-efficiency measures implemented vary widely among establishments. For many hotels, a sustainability strategy includes working towards carbon neutrality, community involvement, supporting conservation initiatives and participating in a range of certification programs. However, not all hotels are green, and often even basic measures have not [...]

Water has become one of the scarcest resources as its consumption has increased sixfold in the last century. At the present time, over 40% of the world’s population lives in water poverty (1-4). In Québec, water quality and resource ownership are of greater concern than water availability since many lakes have suffered from algal outbreaks [...]

Improvements of environmental performance by the accommodation sector are not measured systematically and this makes it hard to estimate the extent of real change. In Canada it is certainly not uniform according to adherence to the programs detailed in Table 1. Although some hotels continue greening their performance, the sector is only at the beginning [...]

Tags: Around the world, Greenhouse-effect, hotels, Issues, purchase-behavior, responsible-travel, Sustainable tourism, travel-behavior

Rachel Dodds, Director, Sustaining Tourism, & Assistant Professor, Ryerson University and Marion Joppe, President, Tourism Environment, & University Research Chair in Tourism, University of Guelph are assessing the demand for sustainable tourism in this article. Although there is no question that tourism needs to be sustainable, the actual demand for sustainable tourism is difficult to [...]

Tags: environment, purchase-behavior, responsible-travel

Green purchasing or sustainable procurement is a tool to mitigate the environmental impacts of consumption. It simply means looking at what products are made of, where they come from, how they are made and how they will be disposed of at the end of their life cycle. Green purchasing is also an initiative to consume [...]

Tags: montreal, Sustainable tourism, travel-behavior, virtual-communities

The accommodation sector is experiencing an intense diversification phase, where establishments worldwide continue to distinguish and redefine their image by incorporating themes amongst other things to create an authentic visitor experience. The same process of diversification is also present in the cyber travel community CouchSurfing, where authenticity has a meaning that goes well beyond traditional [...]