Yes. Thank you.
As a matter of fact, we do conversion studies in all our markets. Conversion studies are really, when we do a marketing campaign, third-party audited results. We would go back, say, and ask a sample of the questions, ask whether people saw our advertising and whether it created any impact for them. When they say yes, we give them four months to visit Canada, spend some money, spend some time here, and come back. Then we ask them the same questions about how much money they spent and whether they went, so that we can do an evaluation of what kinds of returns we get as a direct result of our marketing campaigns.
In fact this just came out today, so the timing is good: we have four markets for which we have the conversion results out now. These are the U.K., France, Germany, and Australia.
Out of the U.K. itself we have almost 300,000 incremental tourists coming to Canada as a result of the investment we made this year alone. Apart from the increased investment and the Olympics, there were no other changes to the strategy itself; the messaging was more or less the same and the advertising was the same. Though it's very early for us to say, we think this is highly attributable to the investment the government made in marketing investment for Canada, and of course something huge called the Olympics, which of course would have had the expected impact that it had.
Over 70,000 Australians—incremental visitors to Canada—came over and above 2009, and 128,000 German travellers came over and above 2009. The numbers from the U.K. went from $255 million to $379 million, thus delivering roughly $100 million or so in increased investments.
So we have quantitative proof. We don't have the U.S., which of course we're waiting for—by a long shot our largest market—to see how we've moved the meter in those areas. But we feel as though we have some very strong early returns.
