Ottawa no longer wants to waste time and money trying to lure American tourists to the land of moose, mountains and Mounties.

According to a new report, the U.S. has become one of Canada’s poorest performing tourism markets, and this country isn’t getting full value from expensive marketing campaigns aimed south of the border.

U.S. visitors spent, on average, only $518 per trip to Canada last year, the lowest amount spent by an international visitor group. It was the third straight year of declines. By contrast, tourists from Brazil spent an average of $1,874 per trip.

The Canadian Tourism Commission, in its 2012 annual report, released last week, describes its strategic plan to stop promoting Canada in poorly performing markets such as the U.S.

The CTC — the Crown corporation that acts as a national tourism marketing board — has halted direct-to-consumer advertising and marketing through travel agents and tour operators in the U.S. It has also discontinued all media relations, public relations and social media work in the U.S., including an interactive Twitter wall in Chicago.

The commission has decided to “cede leadership in the U.S. leisure market to provincial and territorial partners,” Paul Nursey, vice-president of strategy and corporate communications for the CTC, told the Star.

The U.S. market has bottomed out, and Canada needs to reallocate resources to higher-yielding countries to compete in the trillion-dollar global tourism market.

“Dollar for dollar, advertising in overseas markets was proven to generate a higher return on investment than the United States,” Nursey wrote in an email.

“While U.S. leisure has traditionally been — and remains — important to Canada’s tourism industry, it is also ferociously competitive,” the CTC report says, and the commission’s “limited resources prevented us from having an adequately strong impact in the U.S. leisure market.”

David Goldstein, president and CEO of the Tourism Industry Association of Canada, told the Star the CTC’s decision was “a difficult one based on steep federal funding cuts.”

“Canada competes in an extremely competitive marketplace, but other destinations are outspending us drastically to attract international visitors,” he wrote in an email. For instance, just this past week New York state announced it will triple its tourism marketing budget to $60 million.

Here are some of the factors leading to the CTC’s shift in strategy:

Since 2000, the share of tourism industry revenue from outside Canada has dropped from 35 per cent of the industry total to just below 19 per cent. The decline is due largely to diminished travel from the U.S. market.

This country has fallen from a Top 10 destination in the world for arrivals to No. 18 in 2011.

The CTC’s base funding has been slashed to $58.5 million from $72 million in 2012. The marketing board must now do more with less.

More Canadians are travelling abroad. Our travel deficit is forecast to reach a record high of $17.8 billion in 2012, a deterioration of 9 per cent year over year as “payments by Canadians abroad were more than double the receipts from visitors to Canada,” the report states.

Revenue from international travellers is seen as a way of alleviating our reliance on domestic travellers for tourism growth. A Canadian travelling within the country spends less than $300 per trip.

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By reallocating its resources, the CTC hopes to improve Canada’s competitive position and tap into “new and emerging markets” for growth. Specifically, it wants to redirect its marketing dollars to those visitors “who have a high propensity to spend.”

In 2012, tourists from Brazil, Australia, China, South Korea and Japan were the top five spenders on leisure travel in Canada. Tourists from Brazil spent an average of $1,874 per trip. Australia was second at $1,781 and China third at $1,670.

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