My (small) company is a member of several Tourism Boards. I think they do serve a useful purpose in generating coverage for a given place / city. I am regularly emailed ‘opportunities’. Sadly, these ‘opportunities’ are quite simply invitations for me to part with my money, not opportunities to showcase my services or demonstrate skills as a person (blogger, pubic speaker, teacher).

Invariably, the people who I deal with are pleasant and capable, but I feel that their activities are process driven as opposed to initiative led. Tourism Boards need to stay, but in what form I’m not quite sure.

Phil

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I absolutely agree. In the grand scheme of things, the various tourist boards probably don’t receive that much money. However, they should be doing a lot more with it. As you rightly say, everyone has to be more careful with money.

I think organisations like English Heritage do more than tourist boards.

Perhaps it not a matter of whether we need more or less tourist boards, the focus should be doing more with the money they have. I think generally, there is an attitude with some individuals / organisations that they don’t have to provide value when spending money that isn’t theres.

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I own a small restaurant in Manchester and I am continuously contacted by the regional tourist boards asking if I would like to have my restaurant promoted but for this to happen I have to pay hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds for this privilege.

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Hi Darren

Funny you should write this post because this weekend I found out about a foodie event in Bristol that I would have visited. I only found out about the event because the local newspaper reported that the turn out was poor.

Neither that newspaper, nor local radio had mentioned this event. Like a lot of the events organised by the tourism board in Bristol, it was badly promoted.

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You’re right about there being too many tourist boards. There is actually a tourist board in EVERY UK county and in the larger cities. Layers of tourist boards, not to mention the TIC offices (which serve a more useful function). And none of them have any desire to work together.

I do slightly agree that there’s too much of a focus on just London – the problem is though – that’s where everyone wants to go, especially Americans. Of course there are countless other places in the UK to visit, but for first time visitors to the UK and for many American tourists, London fills their ‘Britain’ quota. I’m not saying that’s OK, I’m just say that’s the way it is, and for practicality sake, that’s where most of the money gets focused.

However do we need a Visit London? Especially when Visit Britain and Visit England both promote London like crazy. Certainly not.

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Darren

Its easy to have a jaundiced view of the tourist boards but don’t underestimate their role in providing training support for accommodation providers like rural farmers who diversified to into B & B/self catering.

Its also difficult to actually measure their performence to gauge whether they give value for money. One thing for sure is that Inbound tourists bring in money and many other countries have recognised this and are investing greater sums. The UK is in competition and needs to sell its strengths especially to compete with those countries with sunnier,warmer climes where you usually jet off to

Some of their methods are questionable and yes London is a big magnet but money is finding its way into opening new marketing channels that are Experience concentric leaving the tourist boards to focus on Destinations. An example of public funding going to locals is the small Derbyshire village of Tideswell which has secured funding see ….but if you initiate anything for Leeds be aware that public funds have to be matched funded with private funds !

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Having worked with tourism boards, I can tell you they spend loads of money on events and festivals and often seem to leave out the marketing of these events. I created joobili.com as a tool for tourism boards to get the word out about their festivals and we made it FREE for tourism boards to promote their events and yet we still have to really push them to take advantage of this opportunity.

So I can understand your frustration with tourist boards from a consumer standpoint. But to be fair, tourist boards do a lot of work behind the scenes on a B2B level that provide a foundation for private sector tourism activities.

This is probably of little consolation, but we work with dozens of tourist boards across Europe and VisitBritain is among the most efficient and forward-thinking (relatively speaking). If you think there is too much focus on London then wait to see what would happen if you removed the regional tourist boards you listed.

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Darren

We asked how much our local Tourist Board got from central Government and the answer was nothing..Zero..a few thousand from local councils (very few if you consider the cost of running TIC’s come out of it)

It has been recognized for a long time that apart from America (which just got it act sorted out by billing Europeans for it). Britain has the worse funded National Tourists Boards per number of visitors in the G7.

So here is an idea lets bill the Americans for coming to the UK and use that to fund the Tourist Board.

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Hi Darren,

Challenging as ever! I would have liked to see a little bit of the other side to this post though. I know it’s hard to find out how much UK tourist boards receive from the government, but you don’t mention how much money tourism brings to the UK.

This article from the BBC estimates domestic and overseas visitors bring around £115 billion a year to the UK. I’m not a whole lot more clued up than you on how much tourist boards get in government money, but it’s definitely no more than a tiny fraction of that amount.

So that considered, I don’t think tourist boards get too much money. But agree with you that of course it could be better spent. The UK tourist boards are even more fractious than you have considered here – there are way more than 13. That article quotes the larger ones but pretty much every county has their own body for tourism marketing, most cities and a lot of towns do too. Visit South West, for instance, is a conglomerate of smaller regional tourist boards – Cornwall, Devon, etc… Visit Britain are a fractious organisation by it’s very nature – just think how hard it is to promote 3 different countries (Wales, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland TB are actually aligned with Tourism Ireland), then so many different destinations within that…

Like any marketing organisations they don’t always get it right – so it is good that people like you are challenging them. I also agree that the smaller regionals often don’t get buzz going online nearly enough either. But there are good examples, I think @VisitBritain on Twitter and Love UK on Facebook are both great examples of a tourist board using social media. You’re obviously close to Welcome to Yorkshire but as someone who’s not from there I’m really impressed with their marketing – of all the UK tourist boards I remember their advertising more than any other, and their website’s really good.

Again though, they’d do well to work with people like yourself. I’m thinking of visiting Leeds soon – not sure whether that’s down to Come to Yorkshire’s advertising or your blog!

Ian

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Darren

As always you are able to ask provocative questions.

As owner of a small accommodation in The Hague, I’m a “participant” in the local activities of two local agencies that you might compare to tourist boards. In addition there is the local City Board trying to attract business and tourism on it’s own. From the outside it appears as if there is no synergy between the three at all. All three do get government allowances. The City levies a tourist tax to partly cover for their expenses in this field.

We have too much focus on Amsterdam as you have too much focus on London.

In General I have mixed feelings about the effectiveness of Tourist Boards. However, the problem with us, the accommodation owners, and I take it it is the same for the restaurant owners and the attraction owners:

We do not seem able to work effectively together to accomplish what Tourist Boards are trying to achieve do (or saying they are doing)….

my 2 cents

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I think the question you need to ask is does anyone visit a destination based on marketing from a tourism board? My answer would be no.

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Going back to Stu’s question from the first comment

“I think the question you need to ask is does anyone visit a destination based on marketing from a tourism board”

I have a report in front of me that puts a 4% figure on that…. for adventure travel (people who use a DMO website as part of their trip preparation)

Compare that to (rounded from research)

6% Watch a TV programme about the destination
8% Buy a guidebook
18% Ask friends or family

[Adventure Tourism Market Report - George Washington University, ATTA, Xola Consulting 2010]

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They may be overpriced (for the taxpayer) and unnecessary in the UK, but as tourists in New Zealand, we have found the iSite locations to be extremely valuable sources of information.

Never been to one in the UK, and had never actually visited a tourist information bureau of any kind before (other than the ones in the National parks in the US), but I’m glad they exist here in NZ.

Jonathan

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One thing you’re perhaps not considering is that many tourist boards are stakeholder organisations – ie the hotels and tourism operators all pay a certain amount each year for the tourist board to promote them, provide information centres etc.

In some areas, this works OK. More often than not though, you’ve got a large group of people who are clueless about marketing and are obsessed with getting their slice of the pie. Hotel or B&B owners end up only caring about issues that affect them, same with tour operators. The bickering and carping can become so intense that the the tourist board ends up just trying to keep everyone happy rather than spending time and money doing what’s best for the city or region as a whole.

A B&B owner in, say, Stoke, will often regard it as the tourist board’s job to promote their B&B and send extra customers through the door. They’ll then get annoyed if they don’t see their B&B being actively promoted, not considering that it’s far more important to give people reasons to come to Stoke in the first place. Just about everyone in tourism thinks that their property/ tour/ attraction is a far bigger draw card than it actually is.

This may not be the case so much at a national level, but I’ve certainly experienced it at local and regional levels…

It’s also why you end up with useless tourist board websites that just list absolutely everything, giving a crappy garden centre the same weight as a world class art gallery or major theme park.

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Jared thanks for the comment. It sounds like you face the same issues I do trying to get local event organisers to tell me about their events so that I can help promote them for free. Like tourism boards, local businesses are keen to get mention in the local or national press, but less bothered about blogs etc.

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