He started with City Passports, now he’s set his sights on getting people to Explore Canada. Randy Vannater is Métis and has worked in tourism all his life. He was taken away from his mother when he was young due to her substance abuse issues, going into foster care at five years old and his mother eventually got him back. They ended up in Vancouver and he was the first in his family to graduate.  

When he first started working in tourism, Vannater didn’t know he was Métis. His sister found out about their history and he read an ancestor’s diary that was in the Winnipeg Museum. He learned about his family by learning about history. 

From an educational perspective, Vannater went to Trinity Western University for a year. He worked at a pavilion at Expo 86 and at the radio station Focus on the Family. He married and had two kids. He did community work, joining the Food Bank Board of Directors and later became the chairman of the Christmas Bureau in the Lower Mainland. He washed dishes at night. 

After university, Vannater joined the hotel industry while organizing a ball hockey league, then ball hockey provincially, then NBA games. Because of his charitable work in the downtown Eastside, he was asked to run in provincial politics against Mike Harcourt. He didn’t win, but learned a lot about politics. 

To market the hotel he worked at, he created a program combining history education and saving money at local attractions called City Passport. He worked on City Passports off the side of his desk while working at the hotel for a couple years while raising his young family with the blessing of the hotel owner. Expedia and tour operators sold his product and business was good. He created similar programs across the country.

Vannater became a book publisher, publishing 55 books in five years. Unfortunately, he focused more on creating books than marketing them and went out of business. He’s restarted the business with a new business model and things have improved. “One of the things I'll tell people now is you need to ask for help. Don't be like me and try to do it all yourself.  Maybe I have some trust issues because of the way I was brought up, but you need to ask for help and maybe have more mentors that can help you with your idea or something that you're doing in your life,” he shares. 

“We don't just need mentors when we're 18 years old. We need mentors when we're 28, 38, 48 sometimes. We need mentors as we go through life. We have to remember to reach out to those that are for us and I mean, you'll be surprised how many people care about you,” Vannater continues. 

He also secured the trademark for Explore Canada. His vision for Explore Canada is to market a program where people can learn about the history of Indigenous people in Canada as they travel nationally. It’s going to be app based and he’s looking to drive tourism to First Nations communities, asking communities to share their history to share with tourists.

When it comes to obstacles he’s faced, Vannater struggled with his business model because he wasn’t charging any of the attractions to be in the program at first. He didn’t know how to duplicate himself in terms of training a team but the slowdown from the pandemic helped him do that. The program transitioned to a technology supplier that normally provided tickets but was not ticketing due to the pandemic. Now, he faces challenges around scaling, finding funding and figuring out how to take things to the next level with the right partners. His next step is reaching out to each economic development office in each Nation for the Explore Canada product knowing the end result will be beneficial for communities.  

“You cannot live your life based on circumstance. We are not the sum of all of our highs and lows.” 

If he could share a message with his younger self it would be “you are a big deal”, knowing how his self esteem suffered in the foster care system. Something he needed to realize was that the validation he needed was available inside himself. “Just look in the mirror. You need to love yourself. You need to understand that you're tremendously made and you're tremendously valued and you gotta find people who are going to be in your circle. If someone is not loving you and supporting you, then you know, you've got to deal with that. My mother never dealt with that, and she was abused and everything else. I've got all kinds of terrible memories and things like that growing up, but imagine if she would have known that she was valuable,” he reflects. 

To maintain balance in his well being, Vannater golfs, allowing him to walk, think and travel. He spends time with the Creator and he loves helping others. He believes in investing in relationships, taking care of his health, going outside to lift his spirits, and doing things in the community. “We need to take that time for ourselves, because you can only take people as far as you've come,” he asserts. 

Looking to the future he says, “People who know me know I want to be the most successful business person in the world. I want Explore Canada to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's not about money… It's about using the gifts that the Creator has given me.”

“I want people to Explore Canada, not just because of my product. I want them to understand our history and our culture…. Instead of having them influence us, they've been influencing us forever. It's time for us to influence them and lead, not follow. I'm just trying to add that that kind of narrative to our program, so that when we travel, we will learn, we will explore, and we will understand, and I think it'll lead to reconciliation,” Vannater dreams aloud.

Expanding from City Passports to getting people to Explore Canada and its true history, Randy Vannater is finding a new path for more prosperity in Indigenous communities through tourism. Discovering his own roots and family history was an important journey and he’s helping tourists learn important truths through his next product. With a vision for shared success and heart for reconciliation, he’s taking the next step forward on a journey that’s going to go coast to coast.

Thanks to Alison Tedford Seaweed for authoring this article.