Digital Partner System

The Vendor is required to provide digital agencies to serve as agency strategic Digital Partner - designing, developing, maintaining, optimizing, and continuously evolving agency websites and broader digital ecosystem, while providing forward-looking digital and technology leadership in a rapidly changing, AI-driven landscape.
- Digital Strategy and Leadership
• Act as agency strategic digital advisor and trusted partner, collaborating with agency on a forward-looking, multi-year digital roadmap aligned to agency brand, business objectives, and the evolving needs of travellers, investors, and industry stakeholders.
• Bring proactive, outside-in thought leadership, ongoing market scanning, and competitive and peer-DMO benchmarking to continuously identify opportunities to improve the digital experience and operating model.
• Anticipate and help agency stay ahead of structural shifts in technology, Traveller behavior, and search, including the move from traditional search to AI mediated discovery, and translate those shifts into concrete, prioritized recommendations.
• Recommend, evaluate, and help agency adopt emerging platforms, technologies, and ways of working, with clear, evidence-based business cases, total cost-of-ownership analysis, and measurable outcomes.
• Conduct periodic digital maturity assessments across experience, technology, data, and ways of working, with a prioritized improvement plan and clear success measures.
• Establish and run an innovation pipeline, including lightweight proofs-of-concept and pilots, to test high-potential ideas quickly, with defined success criteria and a clear path to scale or retire each one.
• Tie strategic recommendations directly to agency strategic goals and the growth of the province’s visitor economy, with measurable KPIs and a clear line of sight from digital activity to business outcomes.
• Provide executive-level advisory and education, including briefings, workshops, and trend reports, to build internal capability and support confident, informed decision-making by agency leadership.
- Website Design & User Experience (UX)
• Lead discovery, B2C and B2B audience and persona research, journey mapping, information architecture, and advise on content strategy.
• Provide UX/UI design, wire framing, interactive prototyping, and usability testing through high-fidelity, responsive, mobile-first design.
• Build and maintain a reusable, documented design system and modular component library that agency owns. All design artifacts, systems, components, and associated documentation developed under this engagement will be the property of agency, with full rights to reuse, modify, and extend without restriction.
• Deliver structured, modular content models that enable efficient, non-technical authoring and Omni channel reuse.
• Provide ongoing conversion rate optimization (CRO), including A/B and multivariate testing.
- Website Development, Integration & Platform Management
• Develop, configure, and maintain agency content management system(s) and supporting technology.
• Design, build, and maintain integrations with agency broader martech and data ecosystem, including CRM, digital asset management (DAM), marketing automation/email, partner/operator listings and booking or referral systems, and analytics.
• Apply modern engineering practices: version control, code review, documented APIs and data contracts, and environment management (production, staging, and development).
- Website Maintenance, Hosting & Support
• Provide ongoing maintenance and support, including CMS/core/plugin/module upgrades, dependency management, and end-of-life migration planning.
• Manage hosting and infrastructure (or support agency -owned cloud infrastructure), including CDN and the ability to scale for campaign-driven traffic spikes.
• Meet defined service levels for availability (e.g. 99.9% monthly uptime) and for incident response and resolution, tiered by severity.
• Provide proactive performance and core web optimization, bug fixes, content updates, and quality assurance, including automated and manual regression, cross browser/device, and accessibility testing prior to every release.
• Maintain backups, disaster recovery, and incident response, including defined backup retention, regular restore testing, documented Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO), rollback procedures, escalation paths, and post incident root-cause reviews.
- Search and Artificial Intelligence
• Help agency define and continuously evolve a responsible AI strategy for its digital products, content, and operations with forward-looking guidance grounded in relevant case studies, peer-DMO benchmarking, and measurable outcomes.
• Help agency navigate the structural shift from traditional search to AI mediated discovery, where travellers increasingly get destination inspiration, answers, and recommendations directly from large language models and AI assistants (e.g. ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity) and from AI Overviews and answer engines embedded in search, rather than clicking through to websites.
• Monitor and improve how agency and state as a destination are represented in AI answers, tracking accuracy, sentiment, and share of voice across major AI assistants, identifying and correcting misinformation or outdated information, and strengthening the authoritative sources these models draw on.
• Make agency content and data machine-readable and “AI-ready”: well-structured, semantically rich, and accessible to the crawlers, retrieval systems, and AI agents that increasingly mediate the traveller journey.
• Prepare for agentic AI and AI travel-planning assistants that research, plan, and increasingly transact on travellers' behalf, ensuring agency information, itineraries, and operator/booking pathways are discoverable and actionable by these agents (e.g. via structured itineraries, APIs, and feeds).
• Help agency understand and adapt to AI's impact on its digital funnel, including declining click-through and "zero-click" behavior, by establishing new KPIs and measurement approaches for AI-driven visibility, AI-referral traffic, and assisted discovery alongside conventional web analytics.