“In the Isles of Scilly, myth and reality seem to blend in a cocktail of romantic escape.” Richard Waters, The Guardian. We pride ourselves in going the extra mile to champion and develop cultural tourism in the UK. After finally achieving an ambition to work with the full set of UK capital cities on some wonderful projects, we now have the delightful privilege of working with England’s most southerly and westerly destination – the Isles of Scilly.

With our good friends at Yellow Railroad we will be working with this fabulous cluster of islands – there is genuinely nothing else like them in the UK – to develop a new Destination Management Plan. The culture of the islands and its people are rich, distinctive and not perhaps as well known as they could be – at least in part to their relative remoteness. Aside from developing a powerful and culturally-inspired call to action with the Islands’ Partnership (the destination management organisation) over the next few months, we fully expect to fall under its spell. As Jude Law put it: “It reminds me of all the good things, not only about England, but the world in which we live”.

Manchester International Festival has just closed its doors on its 6^th biennial festival after 18 packed days of shows, exhibitions, events, gigs, talks, tours, food – it seems they do everything. We started working with the festival just before they launched and we produced a series of weekend cultural itineraries for visitors, daily e-newsletters to hotel concierge staff via the Culture Hosts platform during the festival, and a campaign on our creative tourist.com site.

From September we’ll be working with the team to look at how best to position the festival for national and international tourism markets for future editions. Working closely with tourism partners, we’ll target travel trade operators and media to develop the vitally important bookable product offers for the fully independent travel market. We will also look at how to enhance the festival’s digital capabilities for this market. After six festivals in ten years, MIF has a wealth of digital content waiting and ready to work harder in engaging audiences online, building the festival’s profile globally and ultimately converting today’s online audiences into tomorrow’s visitors to the city.