Boosterism - is it always desirable?

Last week Visit York - the body responsible for promoting tourism in York - announced plans  to more than double the value of the industry to £1 billion in the coming decade or so. There is much talk of hitting high-spending market segments such as the growing Chinese market, the usually dependable US market and also business travellers.

On the face of it, there is nothing wrong in being ambitious but I am particularly concerned at what some of the negative impacts of such growth might bring. Latest figures I have seen suggest that annual hotel occupancy in York is around 80% which is certainly higher than the UK national average.  Thus there is already limited capacity to accommodate a significant growth in overnight tourists as there is nowhere for them to stay for much of the time.  Is our product really so attractive that we can attract significant numbers of international visitors in the damp rainy days of February or on cold November evenings, which is when there is some bedspace capacity.  And if we are going to build additional hotels to accommodate more overnight visitors in the peak summer months, where will these be? There is nowhere within the historic core available to build a sizeable new hotel.  Plans are in place for a hotel as part of the multi-use development at the old Terry’s factory off the Bishopthorpe Road but any additional hotel developments are likely to eat into the green belt.  So is it possible that future tourism growth may bring with it further development pressures that, if accommodated, may diminish some of the appeal of this wonderful historic city (which as the photo below shows, I've been visiting for more than 50 years!).

Visit York are of course being canny, in that included in the target revenue figure of £1 billion are the hundreds of millions of pounds already earned from day visitors. And as anyone who has ever been Christmas shopping in York knows, the city is already a magnet for retail tourism. Within the coming months a new John Lewis store will open on the outskirts of the city at Monk's Cross, but will that be enough to compete with the new Trinity Centre in Leeds with its 120 shops and mix of entertainment and eating venues? Or will there be pressure to build more in and around York, to compete for this segment? Once again, I wonder whether there is the physical capacity to accommodate a significant increase in day visitors (for it is certain that all the hoped-for growth will not be delivered by overnight tourism alone).  City centre parking gets full very early and the park and rides are often operating close to capacity at peak periods. Whilst there is a new park and ride facility close to completion out on the Tadcaster Road, will we need even more investment in public transport infrastructure? And again, if so, where will it go? Will we lose more green belt?

York already has a thriving though at times troublesome nightime economy. As research by my colleague Stuart Moss has shown, the economic role of this aspect of the leisure industry can be very significant in urban destinations. But it also brings with it problems. The Micklegate Run is already notorious for the challenges it brings to local business and residents, and sadly the tragic implications of young people who have enjoyed an evening drinking in a riverside location are being played out as I write with the search in the River Ouse for Megan Roberts , who is presumed to have fallen into the river accidentally whilst under the influence of alcohol.

Both extraordinary policing events such as this, as well as scheduled investment like the increased police presence required at York Station from late afternoons most Saturdays where there is a need to manage large groups of people coming into the city for a night out, bring with them very real financial costs to local communities.  And this is one aspect of tourism that is too rarely considered in the media.  With all the emphasis on the positive side (increased revenue for local businesses, new jobs created or existing jobs saved) there is too little attention paid to the impacts of tourism on the many people in the host community who bear the brunt of the negatives and who see little of the positive benefit.

Yesterday the historian Bettany Hughes presented a delightful programme on the history of hospitality as a concept, reminding us that evolved initially as a tradition of mutual respect between host and guest.  Are Visit York perhaps in danger of skewing the relationship too much away from the local community? 

So, the publishers of Lonely Planet have named Yorkshire in the top 10 tourist regions for 2014, where it shares the spotlight with destinations like New Zealand’s West Coast, Texas and Mallorca.  To be frank, this isn’t really surprising. As I have blogged before, Yorkshire certainly has it all, including quiet beaches, windswept moorlands and pretty agricultural landscapes;  quaint villages, historic towns, busy cities and seaside resorts; mysterious ruins and stately homes through to cutting-edge venues for performing and visual arts.  As a resident for well over a decade, I’ve barely scratched the surface of Yorkshire’s tourism product. Although that can be explained partly by the fact I live right on the coast and thus not in the heart of the region, it also demonstrates the wealth of what is on offer and, more importantly perhaps, the considerable effort that has been made in recent years by the public, private and third sectors in developing a tourism economy that is able to compete at the highest levels.

Aspirations across the sector are high – for instance, we have award winning restaurants and pubs not resting on their laurels, but instead encouraging their local suppliers to ‘up their game’ as well, so that they can guarantee the highest levels of quality of ingredients across the year. By strengthening local supply chains, Michelin starred restaurants like the Star at Harome, and more modest businesses like Scarborough’s amazing Eat Me café, are not only supporting their local economies but are also promoting a vision of Yorkshire as a place where quality matters. 
Celebrations of place by the many artists’ networks across Yorkshire are another dimension of the growing confidence in the region’s cultural product – events such as York Artists Open Studio Days remind tourists and residents alike of the wide variety of high quality visual and decorative art being produced locally.  And the performing arts are not losing out either – whether it is established venues like the Stephen Joseph Theatre still celebrating the work of Alan Ayckbourn, or the lesser known Pocklington Arts Centre delivering a broad programme of events that appeal to both locals and tourists, we are blessed with a richness of cultural product.
Today’s announcement by Lonely Planet was timely in that it coincided with a trip to Scarborough  -one of the UK’s leading tourist destinations – by 8 students from Leeds Metropolitan University’s MSc programme in Responsible Tourism Management (photo shows Rashad from the USA, and Diana from Uganda, plus three former residents of the town).  We had arranged the trip to let them see at first hand the challenges and solutions associated with 21^st century tourism in a resort that first began attracting tourists way back in the 17^th century and that for a long time didn’t need to work too hard to attract visitors.  However,  the emergence in the 1970s of cheap package holidays to the Mediterranean took away the town’s core business.  After a couple of decades doing very little the Borough Council finally got its act together just over a decade ago and together with trade partners and external agencies such as the now defunct Yorkshire Forward , have embarked on a strategic plan that is refining the target market, bringing the product up to the necessary quality levels and, crucially in my view, is working with the host community to make sure that we get the type of tourism that we want.   With the students representing countries as varied as Vietnam and Peru, Uganda and Spain, this was a great opportunity to share how one small part of Yorkshire’s internationally renowned tourism product is tackling the challenges of developing and sustaining its competitive advantage.
So even the initial presentation on the history of tourism in the resort by Nick Taylor, the Council’s Investment Manager, wasn’t held in the Council building but in a local café so that from the start we were also benefiting a local business. Lunch in another café was followed by a stroll through the Old Town up to the Castle and an examination of how English Heritage is investing in product development and events to make sure that this scheduled ancient monument plays its role in delivering a high quality tourist experience for much of the year

(photo shows a living history event at the castle a couple of years ago – I’m proud of this shot and have been waiting for ages to use it!).  A walk along the seafront to see what a traditional resort still offers was an eye opener for the group, most of who hadn’t been to the UK seaside before. The final port of call before the train back home was the Grand Hotel, where staff laid on a fascinating tour of what was, when it was built, the largest brick-built structure in Europe!

So ... what did they learn today that will stand them in good stead when they take up careers in other destinations striving to retain a relevance in today’s highly competitive global tourism industry?  In general terms, I hope that they understand the importance of a strong and committed public sector that is prepared to take the lead in driving forward strategic planning for tourism, and the need for sustained investment by the private sector to make sure that plans are actually implemented.  More specifically, I hope they appreciate that even on the eastern margins of one of the World’s top 10 tourism regions, we are working hard to deliver the variety and high quality of experience that is necessary to survive as a thriving destination.

Peace Parks, Mountain Communities and Tourism

I was honoured recently by a request from the Balkan Peace Park Project, a charity with which I have had some dealings in recent years, to be the key note speaker at their AGM which was held in London last weekend. My brief was, well, brief. "Talk about something relevant", I was told.

Fortunately, many years ago and in a prescient bout of literary high-mindedness, I had bought a copy of  Kadare's 'Broken April', a novel set in Albania and that has many evocative descriptions of the way of life in mountain communities in that part of the Balkans in the middle of the last century. From there it was a short stretch of my imagination to pick out some relevant passages from Roger Hutchinson's 2006 book 'Calum's Road', which tells the story of one man's endeavours to construct a road to connect his remote croft with a metalled road some miles away on the small Scottish island of Raasay.

Reading both of those books reminded me of the struggles faced by rural communities and of the ways in which individuals and groups can overcome many of these challenges where they can see a resulting benefit. And that in turn took me to Village Ways, an amazing initiative that was set up to support a handful of communities on the periphery of India's Binsar Wildlife Sanctuary in their efforts to develop responsible hiking tourism.  Funded partly by a UK philanthropist but run very much on business grounds, the company now operated in several locations across India as well as elsewhere in the world.

In each case, the principles are the same - the community dictates how much tourism can happen, where tourists can walk when around the village and what the nature of any face to face engagement should be. Teams from every participating village provide trained guides, porters, cooks and cleaners. Hikers stay in purpose-built guest houses that are basic but comfortable, and walk from village to village through stunning scenery. All stakeholders in each community receive a small financial benefit from every bed night sold in their village, with some of the receipts being distributed to individuals and families, and the rest collectively for the benefit of the village (one community we visited had spent its money on an electric fence to keep boar and deer out of their crops).

So my talk focused on the Village Ways experience as a template for what could be achieved in the mountainous areas on the borders of Albania, Kosova and Montenegro where the B3p project is working. I hope that by sharing a success story from another continent, I was able to help the Trustees, officers and members of the Balkans Peace Park Project with some guidance on how they could begin to build on the capacity building work they've been doing in recent years.

For more information on these two great initiates, see:

www.villageways.com

www.balkanpeacepark.org

What makes a great destination?

So, the main news of the week from a tourism perspective was the fact that Yorkshire, the county I have called home for the last 13 years, was honoured with the award of European Destination of the Year at the World Travel Awards in Antalya, Turkey. This is obviously great news for the region (we can't really call it a county as it is a composite of counties and unitary authorities - gone are the days of the old Ridings!) and apart from anything else is a reflection on the great work that a wide range of public sector bodies, trade organisations, tourism businesses and host communities have done in recent years.

I moved to North Yorkshire in 2000, tired of commuting between my home in the market town of Haddington in East Lothian and the business I had taken over in Malton, another market town nestling on the edge of the Howardian Hills. At the time I was reluctant to move, having enjoyed more than 10 years of life in the East of Scotland with its magnificant beaches, quiet moorlands, small historic burghs and of course cosmopolitan Edinburgh. 

I wasn't a stranger to Yorkshire, having been brought up just to the north in County Durham - day trips to places like York or the Northern Dales were always fun; visits to relatives in Leeds a compulsory part of the journey to or from my grandparents' house in the Potteries.  But when I moved south that July morning in 2000, I don't think I really appreciated quite what an amazing place I was coming to.  And the attributes that make it such a great place to live are also those that make it such a great tourist destination. 

In my job at Leeds Met University, where I have taught on the MSc in Responsible Tourism Management for more than 5 years, we spend quite a lot of time helping our students develop their thinking on this topic - how to create destinations that are attractive places for people to live in; to make sure that the host communities are able to benefit from tourism in ways that they want, and to make sure that the competitive advantage of these destinations is such that the destination is able to attract tourists who really appreciate what is on offer.

So what do I think is so special about Yorkshire?

• the sheer variety of landscapes - from the gentle curves of the Wolds, via the sheer cliffs at Flamborough and the flatness of Spurn, to the wild heather moorlands of the North Pennines
• our archaeological and built heritage - every period of our history is well represented in the portfolio of properties protected and managed for access by English Heritage, the National Trust and a whole host of volunteer and charitable groups. In particular, everyone should know our 2 World Heritage Sites - Rievaulx Abbey and Saltaire
• our wildlife - Yorkshire is at the forefront in developing wildlife tourism in England through the Yorkshire Nature Triangle project, for instance
• our arts - performing, fine, public
• the food - we have seen massive developments in local sourcing of food in recent years, particularly seafoods and game
• the opportunities for outdoor recreation - some years ago I was privileged to lead the team that prepared an adventure tourism strategy for North Yorkshire, looking for opportunities to invest in a range of activities including mountain biking, surfing, caving, rock climbing and airsports
• the people - quirky, funny, proud and welcoming
• our events - from Leeds Fest to the current Bird Migration Festival at Spurn Point, from the Leeds West African Carnival to the Bradford Mela and of course, next year's Grand Depart 2014

Without this rich variety within a destination, it is much harder to develop initiatives that can succeed in an increasingly noisy and fragmented tourism marketplace. So raw materials are essential, but they only become part of 'tourism' when they are packaged and sold. So we must credit the work of Welcome to Yorkshire and its partners (as well as its predecessors the Yorkshire Tourist Board and Yorkshire Forward) in galvanising the sector and raising our profile to the extent that it is almost a surprise when we don't win an award from an international tourism body.

So my final comments, for those of you who are reading this and who haven't every visited Yorkshire.  If you want to experience a sample of what we've got, get in touch when you're here and I promise I'll take you for a pint of beer or a cup of tea. And if you want to know how we did it, come and study tourism at Leeds Met University !

How tour guides can make or break a visit

Tour guides are an integral part of the visitor experience in many destinations and often make the difference between a good experience and an outstanding one or, sadly, what potentially could have been a good experience and one that instead lives on in the memory for all the wrong reasons.  I have recently returned from a holiday in the US where I had the misfortune to experience three examples of tour guiding that, for various reasons, showed that there is still a long way to go in terms of delivering an excellent experience that really meets the tourists’ needs.


The first example was at a small historic house in Annapolis, Maryland. The house, like so many in the US, is run by a charitable organisation that has deep roots within the community. And as a result, it is reliant partly on young ‘docents’ from the local college and partly on retired citizens for whom the property and their engagement with it is an integral part of their life. Our misfortune was to be show round by a (very) elderly lady who admitted that it was her first tour in a year as she had been incapacitated for several months because of a hip replacement.  Fair dos to her – she was keen and knowledgable, and eager to please, but the tour itself was an unconstructed stream of consciousness that was long on her personal opinion (e.g. “I like this clock”) and short on context.  A little refresher training on how to present a coherent tour that is pertinent to the audience’s interests (my wife and I were the only people on the tour and she had quickly ascertained we were from the UK) would have enabled us to get much, much more from the visit. As it stood, when we left we felt we had briefly become part of Cameron’s much vaunted (and now forgotten) ‘Big Society’, transferring our care for the elderly across the Atlantic to Maryland.


Two days later we booked on to a so-called ‘eco-kayak tour’ of the inland waters between Chincoteague and Assateague Islands on the Eastern Shore of Chesapeake Bay.  Although the water was calm and the sounds we went through rarely more than 1m deep, I was astonished that there was no safety briefing from the operator before we even stepped into the kayaks. We were issued with life jackets and as we were putting them on a young guy sauntered over to us and announced, in an amazing southern drawl “Hi. I’m Skippy, and I’m your guide”.

Of course, anyone of my generation (born 1960) automatically thinks of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, the popular tv programme from the 60s and 70s. So I was always going to find it hard taking him seriously from the outset. But about 2 minutes into the trip, whilst my wife and I were still getting to grips with paddling a double kayak (I’ve canoed a lot in the past, she never has), he admitted that he wasn’t a proper guide, but was filling in for someone who hadn’t turned up. In fact, he told us, he was a professional cage fighter based in Ohio and was just in Assateague for a few days visiting family. So we had paid well in excess of $100 to rent a kayak for a couple of hours and spend it, not getting an informed insight into the ecology of the wetlands and backwaters, but instead trying to decipher the drawl of someone who had obviously been kicked in the head one too many times.  His lack of biological understanding became evident when, on seeing a Tern, Skippy tried to convince us that the Tern family are basically a cross between an Albatross and a sparrow! I must admit, I’ve not checked this out with David Attenborough or anyone else from the BBC Wildlife Unit, but I’m pretty sure that if this was the case, ‘Life on Earth’ would have made this clear. So we went from random information overkill to nonsense information overkill.

Hoping for a more satisfactory experience we headed south to Williamsburg and the myriad of heritage sites along the James River. We decided to visit Historic Jamestowne, a site managed by the US National Parks Service, global leaders in interpretation and an organisation dedicated to delivering customer satisfaction. We booked onto the 10.00 tour and waited for a smartly clad, uniformed ranger to show us round the archaeological remains. Instead we were greeted by a youngish lady dressed in early 17th century clothing who spoke to the group in a cod-Shakespearean English accent straight out of am-dram acting. On and on and on she droned, asking us where we’d travelled from, what we did for a living and translating this information into a narrative that implied we were all there to help build the settlement. It was AWFUL. First-person costumed interpretation is difficult to pull off at the best of times, but although the presentation appeared to be being lapped up by the Americans in the group, it reminded me of every 1940s movie set in Merrie England. Unfortunately we could only gain admission to the site museum as part of the group so we couldn’t make a break for the border too early. When we did, we vowed that we would do no more tours that holiday.

Why have I been rabbiting on about this? Well, we spent around $150 between us on admission tickets for these three experiences, and apart from catching the sun during the kayak trip and getting bitten to buggery by mosquitos and other bugs on the Jamestown tour, we’ve got nothing to show for that investment. Apart from a couple of impressions that we can use at dinner parties to entertain friends. Oh, and we’ve already told anyone who will listen which historic properties in Annapolis and Williamsburg NOT to visit, and which company NOT to use for an ‘ecotour’ around Assateague. It was the end of the season, perhaps site operators were getting lazy or complacent. But there is no excuse not to deliver the highest standards of tour guiding to every party. Otherwise, all you get is bad press!

World Travel Market - seminar on visitor payback

World Travel Market is one of those events that I look forward to with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. The former feeling because I am never sure whether or not my feet will stand the pace of wandering around the Excel Centre for 2 days, and whether my memory is still good enough to allow me to put a name to every familiar face I see there. Excitement because it is one of the foremost opportunities every year for my colleagues and I at Leeds Met and at ICRT to spread the word about Responsible Tourism.

This year’s RT awards were as powerful as ever in terms of raising awareness of the great stuff that is being done around the world to help communities benefit more from tourism, and to help tourism businesses work more smartly in terms of delivering the highest standards of customer experience without trivialising the cultures their guests are visiting, or damaging irrecoverably the landscapes they are passing through. So all thanks to Professor Harold Goodwin, Justin Francis and the WTMRTD team for their hard work promoting, judging and presenting the awards.

But for me, the real work gets done in the breakout sessions that we offer, exploring different themes associated with Responsible Tourism. This is the fourth year that I have had the privilege of chairing one of the sessions. Last year we looked at managing visitors in World Heritage Sites, and this year we explored the concept of visitor payback initiatives – how to move beyond levying an admission charge but instead raising funds from tourists and tourism businesses and investing these resources in initiatives that really benefit the host destination and the resident community.

My three speakers were excellent and sadly, we ran out of time for a longer debate on some of the challenging issues they raised. But I know I’ll be thinking about what they all said and introducing key points into forthcoming lectures so that my students – undergraduate and postgrad – begin to appreciate what we as an industry can do to progress still further the spirit and the aims of the Cape Town Declaration.

Kath Bateman from Caledonia – a specialist language and dance tour operator based in Edinburgh and operating mainly in Cuba – spoke passionately about all the little things she does in terms of putting together packages that are true partnerships with the host community.  Employing, for instance, one dance tutor for every holidaymaker rather than one for the whole group. Limiting group sizes to 15 so that the impact on the host community is not overwhelming and so that the internal group dynamics don’t fragment too much. Utilising homestays rather than government-run hotels, so that the additional income goes straight into the pockets of the community. All small steps but when taken together, having a real benefit in the destination.

Hetty Byrne from the Forest of Bowland AONB spoke about a range of initiatives they are engaged in to promote a more sustainable and responsible approach to tourism in this hidden corner of Lancashire. Partnership again was a word that came up, both in terms of publc:private sector relationships but also between local tourism SMEs. She talked about two businesses who promoted an attractive walking route between the two locations, so that guests staying in one place could spend a day rambling through the AONB before ending up in a guest house offering a similar standard of experience. It might not deliver a major increase in business to either partner, but even if it stimulates a handful of extra bednights each season, that is income that otherwise would not have been earned. Incrementalism was another theme of Hetty’s talk – she mentioned a local inn that asked for a voluntary 20p donation on every bill, with the money to go towards improving access to the countryside for people with mobility problems. Some eighteen months later, thousands of pounds had been raised to purchase an electric buggy suitable for people with impaired mobility and to treat some of the routes around the inn so that they were fully accessible. Twenty pence on a bill of £20 or £30 is marginal to the customer, but added up those individual 20 pences have made a major difference in the destination.

The final speaker, Ruth Kirk from Nurture Lakeland, picked up on the theme of visitor giving and talked about some of the strategies for extracting funds from tourists. Voluntary donations are an obvious one, but she also mentioned how other businesses are also acting as conduits for funds that are collected and used to provide match-funding for major conservation projects such as footpath repair initiatives. One of the cruise operators running ferries on Ullswater asks for a small donation as part of the ticket income and some accommodation providers do the same. In the 18 years that the Lake District has had some form of visitor payback initiative, more than £2 million has been raised to invest in conservation projects.

In the short but spirited Q&A session at the end, perhaps the most challenging question was one that forced to address once again an issue we hadn’t really answered during the presentations. The title of the session had asked “Do tourists pay enough for accessing our heritage”? An audience member from Australia posed the simple question “Do they”. We had talked about strategies used by the public, private and voluntary sector to try to increase tourist contributions, but was it ‘enough’. The most straightforward and honest response came from Kath who said that tourists can never pay ‘enough’, because there is always something that needs to be done. Whether in Cuba, where she operates and where living standards remain lower than one would like, or in the North West of England where there is a legacy of erosion on the hillsides to treat as well as a major programme of investment needed to avoid future damage.

So rather than asking are tourists paying enough, perhaps we should be asking, “are enough tourists paying?”  In other words, should we be rolling out these initiatives that we know work for some people and extending their reach so that everyone is involved. Rather than a voluntary donation on top of your room charge, that could mean a bed tax. Rather than an optional top-up on your bar or restaurant bill, that could involve a local sales tax with revenues ring-fenced for re-investment in projects that benefit the host community.  But this would almost certainly require legislation at a time when government is seeking to remove as much red tape as possible because it is seen to stifle growth. So whilst some of us understand the  importance of understanding and responding to the polluter pays principle, both from an industry and consumer side, I’m not sure that the rest of the world is ready to play ball. Yet.

And in terms of my memory. Apologies to Rosie, for forgetting where I know you from (now I remember – a night out on the Senegambia strip and some very good whisky and cigars).

Am back in Addis Ababa working on the next phase of the Entoto Cityview project, a feasibility study for a major new tourist destination on the ridge of hills immediately to the north of the city. Our Phase 2 report has been accepted by the client so we are now embarking on the refinement of our initial proposals.  These include a lodge, restaurant visitor centre to interpret Ethiopia’s rich cultural heritage and a craft area where visitors can view handicrafts being produced.  Other components could include a high altitude training centre for athletes (our site is at 3,000m) and a backpacker hostel.

Sadly the rainy season has arrived and it has been difficult trying to get the client out of the office so we can talk through our ideas onsite. Though given the torrential downpours we’ve seen over the last few days, the ground conditions are likely to make any detailed site investigations difficult in any case.

So instead I’ve been doing some research on a couple of topics of relevant to the business planning phase of our work – potential demand for the backpacker hostel, and local handicraft initiatives with whom we could partner.  Interestingly, whilst there are some really good mapping studies showing backpacker flows around Australia, South East Asia and South Africa I’ve come across nothing on the volume or profile of the market in East Africa. So if anyone knows of any work I might have overlooked, please let me know. 

As for the handicraft sector, tomorrow I’m meeting key personnel in the Ministry of Tourism & Culture with responsibility for a number of initiatives across the country. Hopefully I’ll come away from the meetings with enough information to allow us to determine the size of that part of the development and also, who we could partner with. I am particularly keen to get the Beza Community Outreach project involved – they work with women infected with HIV, training them in jewellery production and providing them with an opportunity to earn a living. Their designs use coffee beans, silver beads and also the bronze casings from bullets, combining innovative design with recycling, something that is more and more common in the sector.  So to inspire you, here are two photos of recycled handicrafts – one of necklaces made by Beza here in Ethiopia, and the other a picture made from Coke cans from the Gambia. Enjoy.