There can never be too much education. I couldn't tell you how many people say to us, “If only I had known...”. Sometimes decisions made abroad can be quite impetuous.
We think the penetration of our website is about 35% of Canadian travellers. We face particular challenges in reaching young people. And we also experience challenges in reaching people of dual nationality, who often think they don't need the Government of Canada to tell them anything about their home country.
Things are changing. For example, I discovered that bookmarking our website is “so last century”. Now you use a search engine and type in “Barbados driving”. You don't go to the Canadian government website any more. Now we're doing research on how we can write our travel report on driving in Barbados so that when you go into Google, we come up as one of the top three sites and not somewhere on page 2, because nobody is ever going to go to page 2.
Travel has become much less expensive. The once-or-twice-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe has now become every other year. You go to Thailand and the next year you go to Africa for a safari--not to mention high school programs. As early as grade 10, you can do a high school biology credit in Guatemala and throw in some horseback riding while you're at it.
The industry has changed. You now have a lot of self-employed, Internet-based travel providers working out of their basements. It has become an excellent way of supplementing your income. We have to reach out and train those people. We have a textbook that we ask travel planners to use, so we're constantly trying to adjust.
Another example is teaching English as a second language. A number of years ago, some Canadian students ran into difficulty in Japan and South Korea. When they got there, either the schools didn't exist, they weren't paid, or they weren't housed. So we have an online publication dedicated to Canadians who are thinking of going to Taiwan, Japan, or South Korea to teach English. In addition, we do outreach through the universities. We're physically present at the fairs in the universities to try to reach as much of our potential client base as we can.