Consultant Connect

As a non-profit social enterprise, we work with communities and organizations to support fresh and enhanced experiences for both visitors and residents in our region. We have worked with organizations and businesses throughout the Vancouver Island Region and across the province for more than 20 years.

We provide highly customized services to destination organizations and their diverse stakeholders. We seek to co-create positive change in the way that people experience place, and we specialize in community-based participatory research and strategy development. We are agile in our project management and bring a capacity-development approach. We are also outcome-oriented and focus on “good growth” or growth in production/consumption if it supports growth in raising welfare and/or regenerating natural systems. The flourishing futures of the destinations that we work with is what motivates us.

Canadian Ecotourism Services (CES) is a tourism and community development firm whose expertise lies in tourism and business development, stakeholder consultation, and strategic planning. For the past 25 years, we have worked with entrepreneurs, communities, and organizations in often-remote areas to find innovative solutions for sustainable economic development. We have established an ability to work closely with their clients to assure that planning and business development initiatives are integrated with local conditions.

CBRE has extensive experience working on destination development plans for tourism organizations across Canada. In each case, we recognize the strong competition for visitors and importance of uncovering unique value propositions inclusive of culture, history, environment, and infrastructure—primarily through stakeholder engagement and destination analysis—in order to determine the essence of the respective tourism destinations. Our approach leverage in-house data to help tourism organizations build strategic leadership, assess market readiness, and define the destination’s value proposition.

We are experts at regenerative tourism (sustainable tourism, positive impact tourism) and have proprietary frameworks and processes to benchmark (social, environmental and economical), measure, develop full regenerative strategies, develop special programming, stakeholder engagement, masterclasses, etc. ConnectSeven is also the North American provider for the Global Destination Sustainability Movement (www.gds.earth). We have worked with destinations across Canada (including Destination Canada, Travel Alberta, Destination BC, etc.) and globally. We are speakers, educators and facilitators.

GreenStep helps organizations measure their impact, improve operational efficiency, and save costs through a number of consulting services. In addition to GreenStep's consulting services, GreenStep offers Sustainable Tourism Certification for both businesses and destinations. GreenStep Sustainable Tourism is the only Certification program, recognized by the GSTC, that is based in Canada. Both sets of criteria have been internationally-recognized to meet the global standards and best practices for sustainable tourism, based on the established four pillars; management, social and economic, natural and cultural, and environmental sustainability. GreenStep also offers a variety of services specific to Destinations (DMOs/RTOs), these include training and workshops for destination managers and/or stakeholders, sustainability strategy development, stakeholder/industry support programs, and a destination dashboard where aggregated data can be viewed for a specific geographic region or by sector, in order to assess how the industry is performing across the four categories and overall.

MMGY NextFactor is an industry-leading consulting firm specializing in travel and tourism. Our team of experts has delivered insights and strategies to more than 330 destinations across the globe. We specialize in strategic planning and tourism master planning.

We believe in the transformative power of travel. We realize that to be a leader in the tourism sector today is to be an architect of future economies, societies and possibilities. We provide the intelligence, insight and inspiration these leaders require to make a meaningful, sustainable and equitable difference in their communities.

Regenesis is one of the earliest practitioners of a regenerative approach to tourism. Since 2006 with financially successful and thriving community and visitor engagement in projects such as Playa Viva, Juluchuca, Mexico. We also wrote the Regenerative Approach to Tourism Guide for Destination Canada.

Twenty31 is a consultancy that harnesses the power of strategy, research, and technology to create a unique competitive position and a blueprint for the future for leaders of organizations that span the tourism ecosystem. We are at the nexus of advanced research, analysis, and application – moving beyond data delivered by traditional agencies to unlock meaning, innovation, and recommendations to drive destination development and management strategy. We exclusively focus on developing strategies within the parameters of the UN’s SDGs and partner with over 150 destinations around the world.