Rebranding a City: What Discover Surrey Taught Our Urban Tourism Class
When a guest speaker from Discover Surrey visited our urban tourism class this week, she opened not with a slide deck but with a story: a chance conversation with a masked stranger at a Hudson’s Bay cash register in Kamloops during COVID. That stranger turned out to be the City of Kamloops’s tourism coordinator — and that one small-talk moment launched a five-year career in tourism that eventually brought her to Surrey.
It was a fitting start, because her whole talk turned out to be about the same idea: how a place — or a person’s career — earns its reputation, and how much work it takes to change one.
Surrey’s biggest competitor isn’t Vancouver. It’s the idea of Vancouver.
Discover Surrey is the city’s destination marketing organization, funded through the 3% hotel tax that every visitor pays when they stay overnight — split three ways between Discover Surrey, the City of Surrey, and the Surrey Hotel & Motor Association. The model is simple: “heads on beds.” No visitors, no hotel stays, no funding.
But the organization’s biggest obstacle isn’t a lack of things to see or do — Surrey is on track to overtake Vancouver as BC’s largest city within five years. The problem is that almost nobody, including many of its own residents, calls it Surrey. Ask someone from Cloverdale where they live, and they’ll say Langley. Ask someone from South Surrey, and they’ll say White Rock. Even the speaker’s own summer hires named White Rock Beach as their favourite spot “in Surrey” — not realizing White Rock is an entirely separate municipality, split from Surrey by a single street.
That identity gap is Discover Surrey’s core challenge: building destination awareness for a city that’s constantly being absorbed, in people’s minds, into its more famous neighbours.
A bold campaign, a city veto, and a lesson in tone
One of the most candid parts of the talk was a case study in what happens when a marketing idea doesn’t survive contact with its client. Discover Surrey developed a campaign called “Surrey Not Sorry” — a defiant answer to the city’s negative outside reputation, meant to say: we’re not sorry for our diversity, our food, our beaches. About $400,000 went into developing it.
The City of Surrey killed it before launch.
The speaker’s own take was thoughtful: for residents who had lived through the real consequences of the city’s crime-related headlines — including trauma and loss — a campaign built around “not sorry” risked sounding dismissive rather than defiant. Our class added another angle: leading with “not sorry” could read, internationally, as an implicit admission that there was something to apologize for in the first place.
The replacement — “It’s Time to Discover Surrey” — is safer, more conservative, and has since become one of the organization’s more successful campaigns, now appearing on advertising as far away as Seattle.
Turning hidden gems into bookable experiences
A lot of the talk focused on Discover Surrey’s shift from pure marketing toward what the industry calls “destination development” — actually building new tourism products, not just promoting what already exists.
The standout example was the Signature Experiences program: last year, Discover Surrey partnered with eight local businesses and a US-based experience designer to turn everyday local offerings into structured, bookable tourism experiences — including a Bollywood dance experience, a honeybee experience, a guided food tour, and a cupcake-decorating session with a Netflix “Is It Cake?” contest winner.
Then there’s the Surrey Spice Trail, a food-tourism app built around ten of the city’s restaurants — deliberately chosen so no two serve the same cuisine. Visitors collect a badge at each stop, and once all ten are collected, they can enter a draw for a Surrey staycation (the full rewards program launches this October).
The underlying message: Surrey doesn’t need to invent new attractions so much as give its existing ones — restaurants, trails, and local businesses that don’t yet think of themselves as part of the tourism industry — the packaging and support to become destinations in their own right.
The FIFA effect, and other things nobody expected
Sport tourism came up too, most vividly through the FIFA World Cup 2026. Matches are being hosted in Vancouver, but the ripple effects reached Surrey — a Fan Fest at Surrey Central and Surrey Plaza drew crowds to watch games together, even as Vancouver hotel bookings reportedly dropped about 20% because the city cancelled other events to make room for FIFA.
The speaker also pointed to Tourism Squamish’s “Red Bag” program — visitors pick up trail litter and trade a full bag for a free coffee or treat — as a sustainable-tourism model worth borrowing, and touched on bigger industry trends: wellness travel, nature tourism (Surrey has roughly 800 trail parks), authentic cultural experiences, and the growing pressure on destination organizations to show up in AI-generated trip recommendations from tools like ChatGPT.
The takeaway for students
Asked for career advice, the speaker circled back to where she started: the conversation at the Hudson’s Bay till. Her advice was simple — never stop talking, be proactive, and don’t waste an opportunity just because it doesn’t look like one yet. Her own next goal is a role at Destination British Columbia, and she credits a chance seat next to someone from that organization at a conference for putting it on her radar.
For a class studying urban tourism, it was a useful reminder that behind every campaign, every rebrand, and every “heads on beds” statistic, there’s usually a much messier, more human story — of hotel taxes and marketing vetoes, sure, but also of a lady in a TRU mask who decided to come back four hours later.
