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.

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

We like to practice what we preach and get under the skin of a place when we visit for the first time. Last month we went to Dundee to give the key-note at The Mix-IN – an event organised by Creative Dundee for the city’s cultural and creative industries and tourism partners.

Getting off the train you are greeted with the final stages of the brand new V&A build on the waterside. The city is gearing up for its opening in 2018 and recognises the need to build partnerships, raise skills and increase capacity to optimise the cultural tourism benefit.

At The Mix-IN we heard about pilot cultural tourism projects funded by a new small grants scheme; how the local design and digital sector is feeding creative ideas in to the mix and how the UNESCO ‘design-city’ status is being made visible and tangible for students, creatives, residents and visitors. We loved the crowd-sourced map of the city that Creative Dundee has produced and a talk about the growth of the Scottish Mountain Biking sector was a brilliant parallel case study of how long-term vision and leadership, infrastructure investment, talent, iconic moments and entrepreneurship has created a thriving sporting and tourism industry. Next day we found great coffee-bars cum galleries and a tiny shop selling vintage spectacles amidst the old warehouses and printworks that are fast-developing as a cultural quarter.

As a ‘business tourist’ the welcome and enthusiasm we found in Dundee was exemplary – and catching! We’ll be back to explore as cultural tourists ourselves, and wish Dundee the very best of luck with its exciting plans.

Perhaps the star of the show was the venue. Hospitalfield isn’t on the visitor map – yet. A few miles out of Dundee in Arbroath – this artists’ retreat is in an inspirational setting: coast, countryside and a stunning historical building very evident of an Arts and Crafts feel and its own kitchen garden. A future plan for the house is unfolding. Working with architects Caruso St John, new developments will allow resident artists to share these charismatic historical spaces with visitors, whilst retaining the privacy and sanctuary of the retreat. If you are up that way we highly recommend a visit.

When someone mentions Scandinavia or the Nordic region we tend to think of stunning scenery of fjords, geysers, waterfalls, forests, snow covered wilderness or maybe Nordic noir literature and film, hygge, colourful sweaters and places that top international polls as the best and happiest places to live.  But maybe we should be considering visiting specifically to experience their contemporary culture?

So, with our Nordic partner Nordic Intercultural Creative Events (NICE), we have secured funding from NATA (North Atlantic Tourism Association) to visit Iceland and the Faroe Islands to start talks about the potential for cultural tourism.

Image: Ásmundarsafn (part of Reykjavík Art Museum)

In the first weekend of May, cultural organisations across Bristol and Bath offered free tickets to residents and invited them to ‘live like a tourist’. As part of our continuing work with Bristol & Bath Cultural Destinations Consortium, we used Culture Hosts, our digital collaboration platform, to gather event information from multiple partners and power listings on the Residents Weekend Website.

Culture Hosts is a well-established tool in Manchester’s cultural landscape, with more than 300 arts organisations and tourism businesses now using Culture Hosts to share their event listings and venue information. Culture Hosts has powered creativetourist.com for nine months but this is the first example of it being used to power event listings on another website – and the first time partners outside Greater Manchester have used it as a collaboration platform.

Culture Hosts will continue to play a key part in collaboration and discovery in Bristol and Bath, powering the soon-to-be-launched Explore More website, a new shared portal for arts and culture in the cities.

View CTConsults’ case study – Bristol and Bath – A tale of two cities

One-night, city-wide, social

Manchester After Hours is back: our interpretation of the national Museums at Night festival of lates takes place only one night each year, bringing unusual collaborations and stand-out events to venues across the city.

Perhaps you didn’t know that Creative Tourist does the fundraising, coordination, programming, marketing and PR – delivered by our crack team of staff and associates – Ben Williams, Rivca Burns, Dave Sedgwick and Rachel Furst. This year the project is supported by Transport for Greater Manchester who will run a late night shuttle bus between the venues.

Manchester After Hours is funded by Arts Council England.

It all takes place on Thursday 18 May and will include experimental electronic music in the city centre’s oldest building, DJs and visual artists programmed by cult online radio station NTS Radio in the stunning surrounds of Whitworth art gallery, spoken word in the beautifully restored house of one of Manchester’s most historic authors and much, much more. Here’s our guide to the night, from which you can piece together your own extraordinary, nocturnal journey.

As part of a team of consultants led by Tom Buncle of Yellow Railroad Consultancy, we are starting work on a new culturally focused Destination Management Plan for Woolwich in the Royal Borough of Greenwich. Woolwich was successful in securing Arts Council England Cultural Destinations funding and is embarking on its three-year programme, which includes a series of major events and cultural investment. The Royal Arsenal Woolwich (once the home of Arsenal ‘the gunners’ football club) is due to undergo significant change in the next few years with Crossrail services beginning next year, plans for new indoor and outdoor performance spaces and resident cultural companies moving in.