Hit the North

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