I have the privilege of working with many players in tourism in Quebec. Hotels, tourist offices, destinations… Those who held on and worked miracles during the pandemic hope to catch up with traffic finally meeting expectations.
Posted at 3:00 p.m.
Except that…
The gateway to our city is broken. I’m talking about the airport.
Right now, if you arrive in Montreal, you have to wait several hours at customs, in baggage… or on board.
Coming back from Vancouver, my girlfriend waited for her suitcase for over four hours last night (from 1am to 5am). This week, a client of mine returning from New York had to wait over five hours. His grounded plane was waiting for eight other planes to empty of their passengers. Note the ratio: five hours of waiting for one hour and thirty minutes of flight. Oh, nothing original or special…the examples are legion and the reasons to complain are many. But so are the excuses: lack of staff, COVID-19, Formula 1, and so on.
But… we were already in line before the pandemic. Three-hour waits at customs! It is inscribed in us the idea that arriving in Montreal is synonymous with predictable mess. So we get used to it. We warn each other. We spread the word. But this is unacceptable from a touristic and economic point of view. To push the note, it is about a “crime of reputation”. While we invest massively in marketing and communication to bring people in… we are disinvesting in the real experience.
How to develop our exports if the airport is broken? How to make tourists want to come back to see us one day if their first #MTLmoments1 was a four hour wait in the middle of the night?
IMAGE PROVIDED BY THE AUTHOR
Aéroports de Montréal advertising campaign
I wouldn’t have written this paper if I hadn’t come across Aéroports de Montréal’s advertising campaign, where “Steven” promises us that YUL is waiting for you “with open arms”… whereas YUL is waiting for you with arms crossed. (Nothing personal, Steven, you, we like you!) But why have you spent the least dollar on a campaign to boast of a reception that we are precisely lacking? Why did you not invest in improving this reception rather than in promoting it? From a marketing perspective, this makes no sense. In terms of common sense, even less.
I don’t know if Justin Trudeau is interested in the “Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau Airport” file… But personally, if an airport bore my father’s name, I would make sure that the service lives up to his aspirations.
1. MTLmoments has been a successful campaign for Tourisme Montréal for many years.