British tourist boards need a shake-up
By Darren Cronian on Thursday, August 7th, 2008

I do not believe all of this hype that British tourism is booming, okay, I am sure there has been an increase in British holidays but that’s to be expected with the economic slowdown, it’s certainly not a boom as far as I am concerned.

British tourism boards need a shake-up

Which leads me on to today’s rant.

In Britain we have a rather large number of tourist boards, these organisations are part-funded by the government, and that money comes from tax payers pockets. So I would like to know why we have so many tourist boards, and shouldn’t we be restructuring the British tourism set-up

» Visit Britain
» Enjoy England
» Visit North East England
» West Country Now
» Visit South West England

The list goes on and on.

Wouldn’t the money be best spent on improving our beaches and seaside towns which are in need of serious moderation. I realise that there is a need to promote other parts of Britain but do we need separate tourist boards to do this, surely there’s a cheaper option.

Rather than sending representatives of Visit Britain over to the Beijing Olympic games shouldn’t they be spending this money on improving public transport systems so that tourists have a better experience of travel in Britain.

It seems like an awful waste of money having all of these different tourist boards.


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4 responses to “British tourist boards need a shake-up”

Nick | 8 August, 2008 at 9:50 am

Darren

Trying to explain tourist boards is not easy.

Visit Britain promotes the whole of the UK to overseas markets. In fact Visit Britain has just had is funding drastically cut and is making about half it staff redundant. Keep in mind over the last 2 years it had already made 1/4 of it staff redundant due to cuts.

Enjoy England… is the product of devolution, give each country in the UK it own powers and each will have it own tourist board etc.

The rest, yes, we need far less. But as these are funded by National, County, District councils, I can not see someone giving up there peace of pie.

As for saving money… Our tourist boards are grossly underfunded.. Yet tourism is one of the largest industries in the UK. 5% of the population work in or connected to tourism (about 1.4 million people) and puts about £85bn a year into the economy. Yet it is controlled by a department that does not have tourism in its name and has nothing to do with business or employment. The department for Culture, Media and Sports.

Basically the whole thing needs a shake up and is a complete mess.

Nathan Midgley | 8 August, 2008 at 10:09 am

Our tourism marketing bodies are actually being restructured as we speak. VisitBritain had its funding cut last year, and it’s about to lose 40% of its staff.

Couple of counterpoints: none of the other bodies is anything like the size of Visit Britain. You’d be surprised how small the staff of Enjoy England is. And one of the benefits of these regional outposts is that they can work autonomously - if you had one big body it’d be obliged to distribute its activity fairly between regions, which would prob leave it paralysed by bureaucracy.

Will throw in this quote from a recent post by Bill Geist too: “Increase the resources of a Destination Marketing Organization and, 9 times out of 10, visitor spending will increase. As visitor spending increases, jobs are created and non-resident generated taxes increase.”

In general I think you’re right that the picture in the UK is somewhat confused, though. It would probably benefit from a bit of streamlining.

Darren Cronian | 8 August, 2008 at 1:01 pm

@ Nick / Nathan

Thanks for the comments. Interesting reading.

Darren Cronian | 11 August, 2008 at 11:06 pm

Interesting link received from a contact on Twitter
http://www.tourism-review.co.uk/
Discusses the tourism board review that is currently being carried out.

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