Having run a series of successful marketing campaigns to support the programme at HOME, we’re pleased to announce that the relationship has developed into an annual agreement between this major arts venue and Creative Tourist, with HOME now the partner for our Creative Tourist Manchester Destination Guide. Key to the decision for HOME was the success of CreativeTourist.com as a major traffic driver to its website and, as proven via HOME’s e-commerce tracking, the high conversion rates delivered by Creative Tourist when compared to other marketing outlets.

By developing an annual agreement, HOME has made a 20% saving on campaign and marketing activity, whilst the editors and developers at Creative Tourist now have the chance to really plan ahead, creating guides to seasons and festivals which launch much earlier than they normally would.

To find out more about what marketing support Creative Tourist can offer, take a look at our Campaigns Guide or contact sales@creativetourist.com.

We are so pleased to be working with the Coventry City of Culture team. Still 3 years out, we are impressed by how much the team is already committed to investing in the future legacy – in this instance ensuring that the city’s cultural, heritage, tourism and marketing partners can play a full part in amplifying the Coventry messages and ensure lasting returns.

A practical digital audit is the starting point – using detailed analytics to assess the digital marketing capacity and capabilities of over 25 key organisations – all to help drive the necessary investment in infrastructure and build good, joined-up digital practices as the foundations for successful online positioning, visibility and visitor engagement. The process will be phased to allow assessment and adjustment to best serve capacity and skills development, through a series of practical training workshops, resource provision (including online and remote) and facilitated exercises and pilot activity. This will allow for particular issues to be highlighted and focused on, whether that was Google Ad Grants eligibility, creating ‘search engine friendly’ websites, using Google Search Console to identify issues with crawling/indexing content, or how to monitor and optimise the performance of campaigns.

View CTConsults’ case study – Coventry UK City of Culture 2021

Last year we worked on a Discover England Fund pilot project linking the cultural offer across four northern cities and testing the appeal and logistics of a Transpennine Cultural Rover rail ticket. Together with tourism associates TEAM Consulting, we have been further commissioned to extend and embed this as part of the expanded five cities of the North of England Transpennine project, led by Marketing Liverpool, a division of Liverpool Vision.

Building directly on the learning, this time the North of England City Experience project includes NewcastleGateshead as well as Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Hull to assess the cities’ cultural, tourism and lifestyle offers with particular appeal to the millennial markets of Germany, The Netherlands and Norway.

The second strand of work is tackling how to support bookability and marketing, via an online platform.  The work is already revealing new insights into the behaviours, values and interests of this rising international travel market, how to position places as credible cultural destinations with them, and how to get the product to market.

About the Discover England Fund 

In November 2015, the Government announced a £40 million Discover England Fund, an unprecedented opportunity for English tourism. The Fund delivers world-class bookable tourism products, joined up across geographies and/or themes; including integrated transport solutions to provide an end-to-end customer experience.

The Fund supports the growth of one of England’s most valuable export industries, inbound tourism. Tourism is an industry that delivers jobs and economic growth across the English regions.  The Fund supported 20 pilot projects in year one (2016/17) that tested product development approaches.  In years two and three, 2017-19, the fund will support:

• A number of large-scale collaborative projects to be delivered over the two year period 2017-2019 that will create a step-change in bookable English tourism product for international consumers.
• A smaller funding pot for new one year pilot projects (in year two).
• Continuation funding for existing year one projects that demonstrated early learnings (in year two).

Image: NewcastleGateshead

Did you know that The Whitworth, Manchester Museum, John Rylands Library and Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre are all part of the University of Manchester, accounting for 1.2m visitors every year? Working closely with the University’s Social Responsibility team and our associate John Knell (of Intelligence Agency and a UoM alumni), we are exploring how the university can reposition itself as a cultural university and what that means for Manchester.

Despite having worked with this University over many years, we’re still uncovering a new breadth and depth of cultural offer across teaching, research, libraries and archives, specialist schools, partnerships, cultural practice and artists, and of course its cultural institutions – exploring its purpose and place within the wider city.

Image: Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre

Often cultural heritage tourism focuses on maximising the assets a place has – museums, castles, gardens, waterfront and so on. For some it is about rediscovering and reimagining past glory. Sometimes both. Enter Buxton. The jewel of the High Peak, it has stunning, historic buildings and gardens. It is one of only two thermal spas in the country (Bath is the other – another CTConsults client coincidentally), and is located pretty much only “an hour from everywhere” as locals put it.

As a town, it is benefiting from more heritage investment than most every other comparable place you can think of. The magnificent Crescent is the obvious centrepiece, and is undertaking a massive transformation, helping to reinvigorate the town as much as ’taking the waters’ will do for its patrons. We have just been asked by the town, with our partners Yellow Railroad, Creative Heritage and Sara Hilton Associates to develop a visitor economy strategy that fully integrates the potential of heritage into its planning, from asset management right through to campaigns. We will produce plans that identify and develop a series of transformational elements for Buxton – brand, culture, place, visitor experience, wraparound offer, leadership – which build on the organisational and asset base of the town and its partners.

View CtConsults’ case study – A visitor economy strategy to help us to ‘take the waters’ once more

Image: Buxton Opera House, courtesy Pure Buxton

Two very different projects came together in the calendar this past month. We were delighted to see two Destination Management Plans, developed with our partner Yellow Railroad, launched only days apart by two of our 2018 clients. The Islands’ Partnership (Isles of Scilly) and Visit Greenwich (for Woolwich) launched their respective plans with a bit of fanfare and a lot of pride. Exciting and ambitious plans both, they capture the value and potential of culture and heritage to transform place for visitors and residents alike.

The Isles of Scilly plan has to be bold, as tourism supports 85% of the island’s inhabitants. David Jackson, Executive Director of the Islands’ Partnership added: “Today’s launch marks a really significant moment for the islands. The Destination Management Plan… represents a genuinely exciting opportunity to trigger a real step-change in our industry and for Scilly to become a truly sustainable destination that’s economically resilient yet protective of its precious environment and unique sense of place.”

In Woolwich, and in good part centred around exciting cultural developments at the historic Royal Arsenal, we have worked with the Royal Borough of Greenwich, Visit Greenwich, Royal Greenwich Heritage Trust and Greenwich + Docklands Festival over six months to create a plan that taps into the potential of the district, now accelerated by the impending arrival of Crossrail. That helps to explain the ambition to double the value of tourism by 2020, with the potential to generate over £35 million to the local economy and the creation of 900 new jobs. And they have great Nepalese food too. So next time you’re in London, head a little further east.

View CTConsults’ case study – Isles of Scilly – a destination management plan for the edge of England

Big Ben has been making a lot of noise recently, perversely because it has gone quiet. And that’s because of its significant heritage restoration project (which will in turn be dwarfed by the preservation needs of the rest of the Palaces of Westminster). There is another ‘national treasure’ building about to undertake a similar journey – in Manchester. The Alfred Waterhouse-designed neo-gothic Town Hall (the architect also more famously designed the Natural History Museum) is 140 years old, and while it’s structurally sound it is really showing its age – with everything from wiring to stonework reaching the point where it’s in need of replacement or repair. So it’s in need of major work to safeguard it for future generations and ensure its fit for the 21st Century – both as a visitor destination and as the city’s local government HQ.

The project is called ‘Our Town Hall’, which neatly sums up the sense of who owns the building, and the shared stake that Mancunians have in its important role for the city. It’s also a clarion call to get involved in one of biggest refurbishments of a public building in the UK – it really is on a par with Westminster and Buckingham Palace in scale. That’s why the building will close in January 2018 and it will take until 2024 before it can re-open.

There is a wealth of amazing stories – of Manchester and its people – and the new opportunities for local people that this massive project will create, including apprenticeships, jobs and business opportunities. Creative Tourist is unsurprisingly thrilled to be involved in this hometown project – it’s our Town Hall too. We are now busy helping plan out the strategic communications with the Our Town Hall communications & engagement team and supporting a plan for the next seven years, designed to encourage local engagement in the project.

If you are searching for a Christmas quiz question then let us oblige. ‘Where’s the world’s smallest capital city?’ The answer = Tórshavn, capital of the Faroe Islands.

There are 18 of them altogether – sitting about 200miles North West of the Shetlands between Norway and Iceland – beautiful, rugged and, as you might expect open to the Atlantic weather, wild. When we arrived at the end of November to host the third in our series of Nordic Cultural Tourism conversations, the winter’s snow had just started to fall.

Small and remote they may be, but the Faroes are not insular, balancing an international outlook with its status as the cradle of the Nordics. Its parliament sits on the site of one of the oldest parliaments in the world, where old Norse Vikings travelled to a rocky promontory for their annual assembly or Thing. Today the Faroes still act as the host and guardian of Nordic region culture at the beautiful Nordic House and the now Michelin-starred restaurant KOKS, was and remains, the very forefront of the Nordic food revolution.

Faroese culture is rich in itself – traditional and contemporary. Literature, art, circle dancing and music, often taking place in people’s homes or out in the landscape. Knitwear from designers Gudrun and Gudrun is highly prized. Made famous by the Nordic-noir The Killing, the designers now write personal letters to online customers explaining that their handmade jumpers may take some months to arrive, with stories about the knitters and the sheep. No-one cancels their order.

The Faroes Islands determination to stand firm has included playing Google at its own game with the ingenious Sheep View and Faroe Islands Translates. As a result of this and other initiatives, tourism is on the rise and the 50,000 Faroese inhabitants are boosted each year by 110,000 tourists – although most, disembarking from cruise ships, only stop for 2-3 hours.

Tourism looks set to become a significant new industry but the Faroe Islands want to get it right – finely balancing the twin needs of product development and marketing to make sure that they attract the right visitors for the experiences they can and could deliver, and at a managed pace.

Investment in cultural activity will be key to achieving that. In our joint culture-tourism conversation we found no lack of cultural talent, ideas or ambition, but a clear call for support to underpin the creative ecology and build its capacity so that artists, promoters, film-makers can work alongside tourism growth and not be overtaken by it.

The visit to Tórshavn was one of a series of cultural tourism think-tanks that have been conducting in the Nordic region with Ingi Thor of Nordic Intercultural Events and funded by North Atlantic Tourism Association. We also went to Iceland, and earlier in the year, Denmark.

Image: Nordic House

Bath and Bristol are located only 12 miles apart and only 12 minutes by train, with a complementary offer across contemporary culture and heritage. One city is an established heritage destination, and the other a city rising in reputation for its contemporary culture and lifestyle. But this positioning is over simplistic and leading to missed opportunities for both cities. The benefits of working together are compelling, and so that is what the two DMOs have done.

One airport serves both cities and the drive is on in a partnership between Bristol Airport, Visit Bristol, Visit Bath and the Cultural Destinations partners to see how working collaboratively might tap into high prospect and future growth international markets.

This is the first time that the two cities have joined forces with the airport.

Our task was to identify the market opportunity through consumer and travel trade research in the first instance – and then use that information to create a joint visual identity and messaging.

The result is a flexible identity, guidelines and toolkits to help all the partners to present a consistent, coherent, easy to understand joint offer for the French and German markets.