Isn’t it interesting how a crisis or environment of austerity can suddenly galvanise people to rise out of the doom and gloom and pull together to make amazing things happen.
Take Salisbury and the Novichok ‘incident’. Catastrophic though this was, it caused the community, councils, businesses and media to pull together and, would you believe, even the Russians now know how tall Salisbury Cathedral spire is, which has proved brilliant for tourism. The City was even named the Best Place to Live in the UK by the Sunday Times Best Places To Live in 2019.
Dramatic though this is and one certainly doesn’t advocate a tragedy of this kind, it proves what can be done when people collaborate and have one powerful common message. Here in Herefordshire we have been fighting for years for more support of the visitor economy amid the poor delivery of the original tourism body, causing a complete disengagement in the sector from the local authority and tourism business sector, leaving things in freefall.
Observing this decline, in 2016 Eat Sleep Live Herefordshire (ESL) launched a new breed of destination marketing delivery; Devoid of any public or grant funding, this private company of established marketing professionals had earned their stripes working in the region’s tourism, media and marketing sector. The proactive and energetic team built confidence back. The regional tourism businesses backed them with Membership subscriptions and bought into their other revenue streams including regional guide books, marketing skills training sessions, and private packages of marketing delivery. Following the ultimate closure of the previous DMO in April 2019, ESL is now recognised by Visit England/Britain as the official delivery for Herefordshire.
Still with no public funding or resource, they recently partnered with the city and county’s largest private hotel, The Green Dragon, to stage a Forum to bring together the trading partners that can strengthen a future tourism offer throughout The Marches region. Embracing Powys in Wales, Shropshire, The Wye Valley and of course Herefordshire, the idea was to rejuvenate the whole area and tourism marketing provision through joint working and a public/private sector approach.
Receiving approx. 25million visitors a year, simply by elevating the visitor spend to the national average, the geography shown could increase the annual tourism income by £800million, before you even begin to increase actual visitor numbers.
Hearing from respected national speakers like Malcolm Bell from Visit Cornwall, Katrina Michel from Visit Cheshire, Abergavenny Food Festival founder Martin Orbach, 20 industry professionals formed several topical panels, sharing knowledge and Q&As. The 130 strong Forum was attended by the regional LEP and councils, business boards, larger bodies like the National Trust and Wildlife Trust, independent tourism providers and strongly back by the regional branch of the Federation of Small Businesses, who were a main sponsor of the event.
Now meetings are planned between the region’s private and public bodies to develop and share projects to strengthen The Marches region’s offer but to also promote it through joined-up thinking and practices.
Herefordshire is also about to enter phase 2 of a county wide Destination BID, aimed at providing resource to help finance the delivery of tourism promotion and projects.
A whole new visitor destination is about to be discovered.
Top 5 tips for collaboration:
- If you’re a DMO, embrace your neighbouring DMOs and look for projects you can work on together. Tourists don’t recognise boundaries.
- If you’re an Attraction, incentivise your local Accommodation venues to send people to you, they also need you to attract guests to the area.
- Encourage your local TIC or DMO to coordinate ‘experience or familiarisation days’ between local accommodation providers, attractions, heritage sites, activities etc so that people can build relationships, get to know what’s in their area and cross-promote.
- Encourage businesses to have each other’s links on their websites. Cross-promotion of this kind helps everyone; the consumer sees that there are more reasons to visit and hopefully stay longer and even come back, and the backlinks makes Google rank your website better.
- Want impactful PR? Share the love – a story about a group of people working together is more powerful than one lone voice. So collaborate with complimentary businesses to create tourism stories that will appeal to various media and get a wider reach.
For more info, please visit: www.eatsleepliveherefordshire.co.uk
Eat Sleep Live Herefordshire is exhibiting at BTTS20 on stand A8.
If you haven’t already, don’t forget to register for British Tourism & Travel Show, taking place at the NEC Birmingham on 22-23 October.