Connecting Opportunities and Inspiring Careers in Canada’s Tourism Industry

Encouraging Jobseekers to Discover Tourism

Employing nearly 2 million Canadians and covering industries as diverse as transportation, food and beverage services and entertainment, our country’s economy — along with cities, towns and even the most remote communities — all rely on tourism. And you would be hard pressed to find a sector hit harder by COVID-19 than tourism. This poses a massive recruiting challenge as well as an exciting opportunity for Tourism HR Canada (THRC). 

THRC is a global leader in job design, attraction, retention, training and meeting market demand in tourism. In 2022, THRC asked UpHouse to refresh the Discover Tourism brand through DiscoverTourism.ca, a THRC website dedicated to connecting job seekers with careers and providing human resource tools to tourism organizations.

What draws individuals to work in tourism is what draws human beings to travel. We yearn for new experiences that change the way we see our world, and ourselves. We wanted to position Discover Tourism as a gateway to not just meaningful work and long-term career opportunities, but unique and unexpected experiences as well. 

We created a new visual identity and brand handbook for Discover Tourism, with the tagline Tourism Can Take You There, to capture the universal desire to seek new experiences and realize one’s potential. 

Telling Stories Strategically with Audience-Specific Video Series 

To make the most effective and impactful content for each audience, we created five unique series, totalling over 100 videos. 

Job Profiles: To inspire jobseekers, we travelled across the country seeking out a diverse cast of professionals to create short documentary-style videos showcasing each industry within tourism: travel services, transportation, recreation and entertainment, accommodations and food and beverage services. We found truly inspiring, unique, and personal stories as far east as Halifax, as far north as Churchill and as far west as Haida Gwaii, touching every coast in our search to represent an industry that touches every corner of the country. 

Employer Compass: To empower employers, we produced seven short training videos offering insights for tourism employers that feature easy-to-understand tidbits of information to help improve various management skills. 

Kinetic Type: For more bite-size content, each Employer Compass video is accompanied by fully animated videos that lean on animated images and text to offer one or two key takeaways at a time. 

Career Pathways: To encourage existing tourism employees to progress their career, we shot testimonials from people working in tourism, sharing how they thrived in the industry and why they continue to work in tourism. 

Top Tips for Employers: For a peer-to-peer approach with employers, we asked leaders in tourism to offer quick tips on attraction and retention.

Visual Identity

​The brand photography needed to highlight an eclectic mix of experiences across the five tourism industries while also meeting a variety of criteria (subject matter, location, etc.). We created three categories for sourcing imagery that would support each audience, platform and piece of content. 

Hero shots depicted employees in their work element, with day-in-the-life images positioning employees front and centre. 

Sense of place photography depicted Canadian landscapes and tourist destinations to show off unique workplaces in the industry.

Textural and abstract images complemented web content and animated typography videos. 

We took some visual cues from Discover Tourism’s original logo – a sense of intrigue, adventure and approachability – while utilizing a clean, modern font and combining letterforms with contrasting shapes to
create a refreshed version. 

To communicate unique opportunities and pathways within tourism, we curated an eclectic mix of fonts and established typographical hierarchy that brings both visual interest and structure to the design and web content featured on the site.

Execution

​UpHouse teamed up with Office/Bureau, an Ottawa-based creative studio, to bring the rebrand to life via the Discover Tourism website, while updating existing resources and creating new ones to match the site’s new look and feel. We created interactive web tools and resources to guide people to their ideal career. For employers and managers, our written and video resources focus on attraction and retention. 

Leading up to the launch in April 2023, we also built a promotional kit introducing the rebrand, with materials for THRC to send their partners or use themselves, including social media posts and captions, hashtags, video teasers and blog posts.

Our contractors were not just vendors to us for this project. They provided their expertise as true collaborators.

In total, we partnered with 25 contractors, from editors, animators, and directors of photography to makeup artists and Cree language translators. 

Outcome 

In April 2023, the refreshed brand was introduced via English and French media releases through Canadian Newswire through Cision. The announcement received more than 13.5 million potential views online and in print, plus an estimated $118,000 in publicity.