5A4 Sport Tourism Canada Online conference

[Vladimir Drkulec]

I attended the the 2021 Sport Tourism Canada CEC online version April 7th to 9th with the highlight being the speed dating meetings with 15 communities on Friday April 9th.

I was scheduled to meet with

Tourism London
Peterborough and Kawarthas Tourism
Saskatoon Sport Tourism
Bay of Quinte Regional Marketing Board
Brandon First
Quebec City Business Destination
Medicine Hat
Tourism Kingston
City of Penticton
City of Markham
Ottawa Tourism
Tourism Kelowna
Sport Burnaby
Tourism Hamilton
City of Summerside

Unfortunately the representative for Saskatoon was experiencing technical difficulties and we were unable to connect on the platform but agreed to meet later when our schedules permitted.

That left me with 14 very productive meetings.

It should be noted that sixty communities expressed interest in meeting with us and we were limited to one virtual table unlike the two that we had in the real world events in 2018 and 2019.

Every one of the communities are interested in working with us to bring chess tournaments to their communities and they have the connections and funds to help that happen. For the most part I encouraged communities to work on setting up chess festivals which they can run year after year without bidding and then supplement these festivals with some of our flagship events. Most of the communities were receptive to this idea.

It should be noted that the last few Canadian Opens and CYCC's were organized in communities that we met with at these conferences and the next three will also be, but more on that in another thread.

Being recognized by the Canadian Olympic Committee resulted in the invitation to Sport Tourism Canada conferences which has led to many thousands of dollars of sponsorships for chess tournaments. They have given us a prospect list of interested communities and we have been mining that list since 2018 when we first attended in Halifax.

I have not yet had time to follow up on the meetings (though I have been sending and receiving emails with some of the people who I met at this or previous versions of this event continuously but expect to start to do so systematically in the next two weeks during and after this meeting of the voting members.

This meeting and the contacts we made will be an important tool in helping the CFC emerge from Covid stronger than we would have without this clearinghouse for contacting communities interested in our tournaments. I will have more to say on this later in the meeting.