Tourism IS everybody’s business

The Tourism Forum run on 24th September by the Cowalfest team was for the Cowal peninsula but was actually on the money for all of Argyll and the Isles. The facts, the information, the issues and the speakers are germane to everyone in the region, so we’ll try here below to include the keynotes for wider information.

Why is tourism everybody’s business? Think about it.

• You have personal visitors. You bring them here. You want them to have a good time.
• You meet strangers in your place – in the pub, in a coffee shop, on a walk, lost in the street. Do you talk to them, help them, let them talk about themselves and why they’re here, discover what they’re doing or want to do, make recommendations from your own experience of the place, introduce them to others, make them feel like temporary residents not aliens? Remember what made Sydney the best ever Olympic Games. It was the Sydneysiders – welcoming, helpful, inclusive. People went away loving Australia. The word of mouth was fabulous – and it was true. Sydneysiders were as proud of their place as we are – but maybe were better at sharing it.
• You’re taking potential clients out to lunch and you need them to be impressed by everything – the roads, the place, the food, the drink, the service – the company is up to you.

So even if tourism is not your work, it IS your business.

The event

This was a packed session at the enabling and well organised tranquillity of Ardkinglas House on east Loch Fyne. It saw an audience of accommodation providers, arts and culture practitioners and organisers, specialist food and drink producers, communications specialists, events organisers, community and local councillors, joined by Alan Reid, Argyll’s MP.

There was a well judged, authoritative and focused slate of speakers, well worth listening to. The session was well and cleverly chaired. The event was seamlessly organised and, like all good swans, the effort was underwater.

And it had its own launch event – the unveiling of Cowalfest’s Exhibition on Alexander Reid. Reid was a turn of the 20th century polymath and an Argyll County Councillor for 18 years. An artist and art dealer – among many things – he was a friend of the influential artists of the day, perhaps their equal. Van Gogh painted him. Much of his importance at the time appears to have been suppressed by some of his contemporaries for their own reasons.

The Alexander Reid Exhibition, one of the features of Cowalfest 2009 is curated by Cowalfest’s Secretary, Dorothy Bruce, who has been researching Reid for 7 years. It was presaged at Ardkinglas with a witty pastiche of Van Gogh.

In total, the tourism event was a significant success. a major contribution to this came from the audience. There was no parochialism. There were no turf wars. People were thinking not about themselves, their business and their area but about the bigger picture. It was understood that if the whole of Argyll – with its almost bewildering swathe of unique selling points (USPs) can be effectively marketed, all Argyll tourism businesses and areas will rise on its tide.

At one point Scott Armstrong of VisitScotland asked for a show of hands on who felt that marketing Argyll or marketing Cowal was the more important. With no more than one or two exceptions, the vote was that the priority was marketing Argyll.

When we said above that the event was cleverly chaired by Russell Bruce – this is evidenced by the way he made marketing manifest. Between speakers Ben Thorburn and Iain Herbert, Bruce suddenly asked members of the audience to tell everyone about awards they had recently won – and the VisitScotland speakers who were his market target in this ploy sat up sharply and took note. A selection included:

• Fyne Ales winning 2 Gold Medals and 1 Bronze Medal at the International Beer Challenge.
• Portavadie Marina winning Benromach Restaurant of the Year
• Lochgoilhead Fiddlw Workshop winning a Carnegie Vital Sparks Award.
• Arrochar on Loch Long winning the title of Scotland’s Best Village
• Rothesay in Bute winning the Rosebowl top prize in the Beautiful Scotland awards
• Kirn in Cowal winning the best large village award in the Beautiful Scotland awards.

Were this list to have included Argyll as a whole, the tally would have been even more of a knockout.

Marketing Argyll

The key fact here is that in 2010 VisitScotland is to market Argyll under the banner of Argyll and the Isles, moving away from the several identities in which Argyll is currently lost – including the formless confusions of ‘Argyll and the Isles, Loch Lomond, Stirling and the Trossachs (AILLST).

However, there is as yet no commitment from VisitScotland to taking Argyll and the Isles forward as an area marketing brand – so all those who see the advantage of this brand would be advised to make their feelings strongly felt as soon and as publicly as possible.

It was agreed that Argyll’s great strengths in marketing to potential visitors are its natural resources and the spectrum of activities that these support: from activity tourism, to wildlife tourism, to cultural tourism, to the delights of its food, drink and restaurant portfolio.

Interestingly, there was widespread understanding that collaboration between industry sector operators and between the sectors themselves in supporting visitor experiences makes for more certain success.

For example, Mark Morpurgo from Lochgoilhead Fiddle Workshop, noted that people who came to Cowal for the tour of artists and craft studios (Cowal Open Studios) were more likely to want to go to a folk and traditional music concert while they were there than to come to Cowal for a concert alone

This strategic marriage of experiences is, of course, that adopted from the outset by the big daddy of inspirational Cowal initiatives – Cowalfest. This festival of walking and the arts brings together the landscapes of Cowal with the exhilaration of physical effort and with the imaginative challenges and pleasures of cultural activity and experiences relating to the place.

The role of the big annual events Argyll hosts is to grow from the region’s strengths and, in turn, to draw attention to them – and, as with Cowalfest, this is what they do.

Weak marketing

In our view, the great weakness of VisitScotland’s operation lies, unfortunately, in its raison d’etre – marketing.

Its marketing products – as in the current television advertisements – are the products of middle range advertising agency creatives who know little about Scotland but impress VisitScotland’s marketing team with their metropolitan cool.

The current ad films look pretty. They are weakly evocative. They are unfocused. They are unrealistic – such as the beautiful people gliding through the Scottish countryside in fashionable wools, like Marks and Spencers ads.

Scotland’s USP is rugged, strong, enduring, challenging, weather beaten – and its about doing not drifting.

Representing a country as embarrasingly rich in USPs as Scotland, the VisitScotland promotions seem underinformed and underinforming – vacuous even. Whatever Scotland is, it is never vacuous.

In terms of Argyll, it is also of concern that the two ‘warm’ market segments assigned to the region focus on the mature end of the market when Argyll itself is rightly building a USP in adventure and activity tourism.Yes, the ‘Mature Devotees’ and the ‘Affluent Active Devotees’ (ages 45-55) will always find much in Argyll to reward their visits. But Argyll – like Scotland as a whole, needs to focus on young, active adventurers.

There are key USPs that VisitScotland’s marketeers seem either not to know about or willfully to neglect. An example is folk and traditional music – on which the evaluation of 2007 Highland Year of Culture came up with some interesting evidence. The country’s music was placed in the top three reasons to come to Scotland by both actual visitors and indigenous Scots imagining why visitors would want to come. So where is the music? Where is the embedded rather than the superficial culture of the country?

VisitScotland seems mainly to focus on culture as a selling point in its city break promotions – yet much of the culture of Scotland is physically present in rural Scotland and represented in local museums and heritage centres. Equally importantly, the living culture of contemporary Scotland, with its traditional pulse fused with new and international influences, is perhaps found more strongly in the rural heartlands.

Anything produced by VisitScotland’s marketing team needs heavy-duty internal and external market testing of the Theo Paphitis (Dragon’s Den) variety before anything is signed off. (That means test to destruction.)

Topics and speakers

• Visit Scotland – supporting your business: VisitScotland’s Scott Armstrong (Regional Director) and Ben Thorburn (Marketing Executive, Highlands)
• Step change – Industry leadership to realise Scotland’s tourism potential: Scottish Tourism Forum’s Iain Herbert (CEO)
• Trees + Tourism x Adventure / Discovery = Forestry Commission Today and Tomorrow: FCS’s Fiona Murray (Forest Tourism Initiative)  Elaine Jamieson (Development Officer at Perth & Argyll Conservancy)
• Tourism – the Bedrock of the Scottish Economy: Loch Lomond & the Trossachs National Park Authority’s Dr Mike Cantlay (Chair)

Facts and figures

The core insight (from Iain Herbert of the Scottish Tourism Forum and Mike Cantlay of Loch Lomond and The Trossachs National Forest Park) is that tourism is Scotland’s supreme sustainable industry. It cannot be moved abroad to take advantage of cheaper labour markets and low cost tax regimes. It is here to stay and, unlike some of Diageo’s branded Scotch malt whiskies, it cannot be matured in another place.

From Scott Armstrong, Regional Director, VisitScotland

• VisitScotland is primarily a marketing organisation, employing 150 staff in this field – the largest staff of any marketing body in Scotland.
• It’s annual budget is £72 million. 70% of this is from the public sector – £42 million direct fomr the Scottish Government and £5-6 million from the 32 Local Authorities; 30% from business – for quality assurance and marketing and from retail sales at Visitor Information Centres.
• VisitScotland employs 800 staff, 50% of which work in the Visitor Information Centres.
• It has 4 divisions: Visitor Engagement - includes marketing; Business Engagement – every business in Scotland is supposed to have a VisitScotland name to contact; and this division includes quality assurance; Strategic Partnerships – works with over 100 industry-led tourism & marketing groups; Corporate Division – includes Information Technology, Human Resources and Finance.
• VisitScotland’s website is now ‘inspirational’. It is not now an accommodation booking site. It attracts and then redirects audiences to individual accommodation business websites.
• It is the 2nd most visited website in Scotland – after the BBC’s site.
• It gets more traffic than the tourist authority sites of Engand and Wales combined.
• It gets twice the traffic of the Irish Tourist Board’s site.
• EventsScotland, its separate wholly-owned subsidiary, has a ringfenced, arms-length budget direct from the Scottish Government.
• VisitScotland has no responsibility for business development, product development or training.
• It has a Marketing Growth Fund which can award 50% of agreed project costs to local tourism groups
• Argyll & the Isles Strategic Tourism Partnership includes Argyll & Bute Council, Highlands & Islands Enterprise, VisitScotland and Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park Authority.
• 13% of Scotland’s rural economy is from tourism

From Ben Thorburn, VisitScotland Marketing Executive, Highlands

• VisitScotland’s marketing has 4 priority targets: Walking; Wildlife; History; Heritage.
• 83% of visitors are from the UK.
• Approximately 50% of these are Scots.
• 68% of the value of tourism is from UK visitors.
• There is a worrying lack of awareness of Scotland – estimates of how long it would take to drive from the Borders to the Highlands range from 2 hours to 2 days.
• VisitScotland’s marketing focuses on 4 ‘warm’ visitor segments. These include Mature Devotees (older, value-conscious motor homers who take up to 12 holiday per year – extending the tourism season – and who are interested in walking, wildlife and genealogy); and Affluent Active Devotees (aged 45-55, serious users of the Internet to research holidays, interested in more luxurious accommodation, good food, culture).
• VisistScotland’s marketing has a 500,000 mailshots database; and also uses EZines targeted on special interest groups
• All regional marketing websites are to be drawn into the VisitScotland website
• There will be a 2010 Brochure for Argyll and the Isles – but this ‘is a direction not a commitment’ – meaning it’s a ‘suck it and see’ situation which may or may not be repeated.

From Iain Herbert, CEO, Scottish Tourism Forum (business-led)

• Tourism, unlike other industries, has its marketing done for it by the Government
• The Scottish Tourism Forum is a membership organisation with 16,000 businesses across Scotland as members.
• As an industry, tourism needs to move away from the ‘make or break’ mentality and focus on steady progressive growth
• Projects like the Falkland Wheel also change local business thinking by raising the game, making it more entrepreneurial and innovative
• Argyll and Bute Council should feature tourism in its Single Outcome Agreements
• Skills training needs a single ‘front door’ access. (Only 3 people in the audience knew where to go to get training for themseves or for their staff.)
• Highlands & Islands Enterprise (HIE) has no responsibility for events.
• HIE’s current focus on growing larger businesses means that most tourism related businesses are nbot supported.
• The future is the development of cohesive local engagement – as with Area Tourism Partnerships.

From Fiona Murray, Forestry Commission Scotland’s (FCS) Forest Tourism Initiative (Scotland-wide); and Elaine Jamieson (Development Officer, Perth & Argyll Conservancy)

• The forests are Scotland’s largest tourist attraction.
• During the devastating outbreak of Foot & Mouth disease in 2001-2002, FCS realised how important the forests were to tourism. When free movement was closed down, they heard from businesses which could no longer operate because they could not take walking groups or horse rides into the forest.
• There are over 10 million visits a year to the National Forest Estate (NFE).
• The tourist spend generated by the facilities of the NFE is around £165 million per annum.
• Tourism businesses can use the NFE to support their work.
• The themes of NFE facility development include: wildlife, adventure, activities, heritage (such as Aberfoyle Slate Quarry and clearance villages), general touring and national tree collections.
• There are dedicated FCS Tourism managers in each forest district. Stuart Chalmers is the contact for Argyll.
• The successful branding of Perthshire as Big Tree Country sets a range of examples worth exploring.
• There are 1.85 million visitors per annum to Argyll Forest Estate. This includes 100k to The Cobbler; 50k to Ardgartan Visitor Centre and the Argyll Forest Park; 25-30k to Puck’s Glen; 5-10k to The Cowal Way (half of which is in the NFE).
• Cowal’s significant tree collections are at Kilmun, Puck’s Glen and Benmore.
• FCS is in discussion with important gardens in the south of England about migrating some relevant species to Scotland to shelter them against the projected impact of climate change in the south – which many will not survive.
• Projects under investigation by Argyll forest tourism include: the potential for co-ordinated tourism development; orienteering; forest access to water and water sports.

From Dr Mike Cantlay, Chair of Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park

• There is a worryingly high number of significant tourism businesses around Loch Lomond in serious financial difficulties. These range from Loch Lomond Golf Course, which has been in administration for around a year, to hotels and retail businesses.
• Tourism is capital intensive. A serious – but unspoken – current limitation on credit facilities is born from bank valuations which are unrealistically suppressed for fear of penalty.
• 2010 is the 200th anniversary of Sir Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake, seen as the galvanic for tourism in the Trossachs.
• Perceived quality in Scottish tourism is not an issue – but value is.
• A key to strong development in the tourism industry is the strategic exploitation of Scotland’s USP’s – like the diaspora.
• The release of Mr Al Megrahi is not an issue on America’s west coast. It is largely an east coast concern.
• Current initiatives to create pontoons to allow the paddlesteamer Waverley to dock at Arrochar and Lochgoilhead would bring us back to the transport services in operation 100 years ago.

This last point, with its focus on developing the use of Argyll’s waterways for transport and tourism, found much support with the audience.

Key development issue

A point for concern is that, with VisitScotland having no responsibility for product development, HIE focusing on growing larger businesses and Bank valuation procedures knocking credit on the head, where is the support for product development to be found?

Next?

The epilogue to an intensive and very valuable event is that the Cowalfest team is prepared to run a follow up session in the future – to be considered once it has its own main event, Cowalfest itself, through another successful year, running from 9th – 18th October.