The city tourism department's phantom shopper successfully sleuthed her way through many of Weyburn's local businesses last week.

The winners of the Phantom Tourist's exercise will be announced within the next couple of weeks.

This year's Phantom, who shall remain unnamed to protect her identity, left no flaming Z on the store's front door to mark her dramatic appearance on the scene. Instead, she surreptitiously placed a dainty business card next to the till before she left each business, to warn clerks their tourist alertness had just been secretly scrutinized.

After the Review spent an hour with the Phantom, it was apparent that some city businesses passed the tourist test with flying colours, while others need serious help.

The city's decade-old Phantom Tourist promotion is intended to remind business owners that it's not just Weyburn residents who visit their establishment, said Weyburn's tourism co-ordinator, Donna Hastings, on Monday.

The idea is to remind business owners it's the front-line employees, the waitresses and gas jockeys and store clerks who connect, or not, with the visitors from outside the area, she said. "If their experience is good, they'll remember it but they'll also remember the bad," she said. "So it's a good idea to pass the time of day with them."

Hastings prepares a questionnaire grounded in the needs of tourists for the Phantom to use as the basis for each of her visits. The questionnaire asks the Phantom if the establishment is clean and well-laid out, whether it has a clean and accessible washroom. It asks if she was greeted as she entered, if she was offered assistance, and asks her to make a judgment on the business atmosphere.

The questionnaire also requires the Phantom to judge the friendliness, courtesy and appearance of the clerk who served her, if anyone did, and to measure his or her knowledge of the businesses' products and services.

For the coup de grace, the Phantom is required to pose a tourism-related question to the clerk.

"I've just moved to the city and I'm expecting company this weekend. Do you have any suggestions about what I might show them?," she asks innocently.

The responses in Weyburn's businesses ran the gamut, all the way from the surprising indictment of the city as "boring;" to a mumbled reference to "the museum," as the sole point of interest in the city; to one store's generous and enthusiastic itemizing of half a dozen tourist attractions, accompanied by specific names and directions and a city map.

"You really must see the silver collection at the museum," said one of the clerks in the last store, who took time to help the Phantom Tourist. This store was at least as busy with other customers as the businesses where assistance was less forthcoming.

This year's Phantom was a sweet shopper, not a cranky one; she was quiet and undemanding as she made her rounds. Her overall impression of the city's businesses is that most offered her a very pleasant, helpful and knowledgeable service.