Wish you were here.

As northwestern Ontario's largest city, Thunder Bay's abundance of big-meeting hotel space and top-notch athletic facilities make it a natural spot to host conferences and gatherings.

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This fall, with the encouragement of local hoteliers and sports organizations, the city's tourism division is releasing a strategy to attract more sports and corporate visitors.

"Our leisure marketing is going to taper off and beefing up our sports tourism and corporate strategy will be the next big thing," says Thunder Bay tourism manager Paul Pepe.

On one July weekend, Pepe says every hotel room in the city was booked because of a provincial Under-18 swimming championship attended by 600 youths from across Ontario, plus a handful of other community events going on.

It's an indication of the market potential.

"There's talk about the perfect storm in Canada (for tourism), we have not seen that," says Pepe. "What's buoyed us is a strong corporate and sports tourism market in the first half of the year."

His department will be approaching companies and organizations to convince their cross-Canada colleagues that Thunder Bay is the place to meet, greet and do business or have fun. That means mining, First Nation, health sciences, education and government groups are on their radar.

"Focusing on the low-hanging fruit has paid off well. We're seeing a lot of mining, corporate and government business with some unique conferences coming in (this fall) that are regional, provincial and national in scope."

Tourism officials want to encourage companies and organizations with branch or head offices to send out invitations to meet in Thunder Bay "We're going to be taking that to the next step with a more formal strategy in the future," says Pepe.

There's no hard number on the impact of convention business, but Pepe estimates it makes up 17 per cent of the total visitation to the Thunder Bay District.

However Pepe says the Canadian 'stay-cation' activity is picking up and they're focusing their marketing on the domestic front to encourage folks from outlying areas to come into the city for the weekend.

www.visitthunderbay.com

BY IAN ROSS Northern Ontario Business