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Thanks for the comments. Interesting reading.

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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.

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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.

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