On a particularly glorious day in late July, one of our team played host to a lovely couple from Gouda in The Netherlands. They run a website dedicated to rail journeys www.reizen-met-de-trein.nl. The new Cultural Rover Transpennine rail ticket piqued their interest and they decided to try out the route taking in Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Hull, as part of the #citiesofnorthengland programme (which we’ve previously worked on). So we crafted a bespoke itinerary for the first time visitors and made sure to include heritage, culture, food & drink and of course railways.

We kicked off with a tour of The Whitworth and lunch overlooking the park, followed by a behind the scenes tour of John Rylands Library and a walking tour with leading local tour guide Jonathan Schofield taking in railway locations, historic facts with plenty of his trademark humorous delivery. The evening featured drinks and a sumptuous meal at the Refuge restaurant before going to see Manchester International Festival’s Fatherland at the Royal Exchange Theatre.

If you can read Dutch then click through to their site to read a review of their trip (or just have a look at the images)!

Nordic… amazing design, people, TV, writers, food. And freezing cold. Oh, and really expensive and quite far away (from the UK) and hard to get to/around and did I mention the weather? Also, didn’t learn conversational Danish at school. But hold on. Stockholm is possibly the most beautiful city in the world; Reykjavik one of the most enjoyable; Copenhagen is actually wonderful (we checked); Aarhus is currently the European Capital of Culture; and… you get the idea. And most locals speak excellent English (the rest speak merely very good English).

Each Nordic nation – Iceland, Greenland, Faroe Islands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland – with their distinct culture and visitor offers – shares aspects of culture, heritage and identity. And some similar challenges with prospective visitor perceptions.

Yes, prices are typically higher than the UK (but have you spent a week in London recently?) though there are plenty of ways not to break the budget – especially if you’re culturally motivated. Typical Copenhagen temperatures are only 2°F lower in November but 4°F higher in the summer months than Edinburgh. Flights are regular and competitive as many other European destinations. Flying to Oslo from Manchester is 30 minutes quicker than to Barcelona. Reykjavik from Manchester is shorter than to Rome, London to Copenhagen the same as Berlin.

So, a fabulous array of Nordic places and cultures for visitors to experience and become immersed within. With a little bit of myth-busting, a strong vision and sustained management, programming and packaging, and brand building and campaigning (the areas we are working on with partners in the region as it happens), the Nordic voice we know so well through noir, design, food and yes even hygge will increasingly translate into a series of connected cultural destinations you have to add to your ‘must see’ list.

3 years ago, we created a simple platform in response to a specific local need – Culture Hosts was initially created to support ‘cultural’ knowledge training and supply real-time what’s on information to visitor services staff in hotels, visitor centres, and venue front of house in Manchester. Which it still does.

But once we’d built it, we started to see how its potential to support cultural marketing and place-making was greater than we had envisaged – and very well-suited to the direction in which the digital marketplace was evolving.

Culture Hosts is capable of doing many things along the digital-content, marketing supply chain. At its simplest:

• It is a data warehouse of cultural assets (venues, events, activities) – with information structured in a standardised way that makes it easy to source from partners and easy to share and make visible.
• The content from Culture Hosts is available via an API to feed digital channels who can market culture on your behalf – tourist websites, city resident websites, digital magazines, editors and bloggers, online travel operators (like Expedia, Trivago or Google) – the potential is pretty endless.
• It can filter and cluster content (by place, season, theme, market) to create joined-up campaigns and itineraries for partnerships and destinations.

At the moment, we are testing some new features and uses:

• Monitoring direct return on digital marketing investment – by tracking content and audience reach across multiple channels so we, and more importantly you, know what works and what is worth spending your budgets on.
• Asking how it can help cultural partners keep-up in an ever-evolving world of digital communications, such as help tackle the need to shift our collective thinking away from driving traffic to our own websites to placing content in the sites and in the places where our customers already go instead.
• As a tool for digital communications skills training and capacity building.

We are lucky to be testing and developing these ideas with various Arts Council England Cultural Destinations partners in Manchester, Bath and Bristol and soon in Stoke-on-Trent – but are keen to hear from other partnerships for whom Culture Hosts might be a useful option.

Get in touch with ben@creativetourist.com