With London 2012 Olympics looming nearer on the horizon, the UK Department for Culture Media and Sport yesterday launched Winning: A Tourism Strategy for 2012 and Beyond, in partnership with VisitBritain and Visit London.
The full report – large, but worth a read – can be downloaded here.
Unlike the Scottish Tourism: The Next Decade – A Tourism Framework for Change, published in 2006 with a concrete target of 50% revenue growth by 2015, the UK strategy has yet to set its specific targets or measures.
Why is lack of targets a problem?
Though it acknowledges setting targets, measures and improving data collection as a keys priority, the strategy reads like a pre-report in many respects, because it sits divorced from a concrete growth goal.
To quote the report directly, objectives for the coming months include to:
- Agree a new tourism growth target by April 2008
- Look how to address issue of data improvements
- Agree performance indicators that indicate quality improvement in the tourism experience
The report also identifies research and monitoring challenges that include differentiating between domestic and inbound growth, standardising regional and local data collection and monitoring customer feedback.
While these challenges are common to both strategies, unlike the Scottish framework, the UK report has not included targets and measures for addressing these data and research challenges in the actual strategy, but has highlighted them as priorities to address.
Data collection, setting benchmarks, comparing year on year data is a slow process – and the UK-wide strategy is operating on a tighter timeframe than the Scottish strategy.
Personally, I think the strategy would be stronger by including targets and measures at this stage, even if some of those measures are workarounds, rather than perfect.
How is Scotland’s example relevant?
I think Scotland’s strategy is generally ahead of the UK-wide strategy in this respect, for When the Scottish Tourism: The Next Decade – A Tourism Framework for Change was released in March 2006, as well as defining an overall target of 50% revenue growth by 2015, it also sets out its wider targets and measurements of success.
It includes targets and measures for the tracking and monitoring of tourism effectiveness, even though some of those measures are (in my view) workarounds.
Can either strategy reach businesses on the ground?
Of course, these targets are only relevant if they are embraced and implemented by businesses on the ground. For example, I find this example from Scotland’s strategy interesting and challenging:
“Target 2 – Every tourism business, culture and heritage organisation and local authority will collect feedback from their own customers to help them “know their visitor” – who they are, why they have come and what they want out of their trip – and use this to inform their business strategies.”
Unsurprisingly, I love the idea behind this target – practical business improvement through customer insight. What researcher alive could argue! Every tourism business should be doing this in order to remain commercially viable, even if it is done intuitively rather than through structured research.
But, there is an education and awareness factor involved here. In my experience, tourism businesses are pretty good at collecting feedback and indeed knowing their visitor – the challenge is typically in using that data to inform business strategy.
Personally, in this instance, I think the measure that has been assigned focuses too heavily on the collection of data and not enough on the actions taken as a result of the data:
“Measure – Culture and heritage organisations, local authorities and the Tourism Innovation Group will provide qualitative feedback about the collection of data and its impact. Feedback will also come from the Tourism Research Network, which will require this information to be submitted.”
It’s a workaround, it’s a good start – and it’s better than having no target or measure in the strategy. But in this particular case I would have liked to see an economic measure of ground-level business profitability or growth in here too, as an indicator of whether successful business strategies were indeed being employed as a result of the collection of visitor data.
So is the Scottish strategy a measurement example to follow?
With London 2012 Olympics looming nearer on the horizon, clearly a monitoring and measurement framework is a priority for any UK tourism strategy. There are undoubtedly challenges in data quality and availability, but these are not challenges that can necessarily be addressed quickly.
I think the UK-wide strategy can indeed look to the Scottish Tourism Framework for Change and take from it some valid tracking and research targets and workaround measures.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 4:56 pm and is filed under Destination research, National tourism strategy, Tourism market research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.