The Irish Open which is returning to Northern Ireland and being played over Royal Portrush has attracted major coverage this weekend for a number of reasons not least that it may just be the precursor to The Open Championship returning to the course for the first time since 1951.
The Northern Ireland Tourist Board are expecting in excess of 100,000 people for the event and it is reported to be the first European Tour event to have been sold out in advance.
And Scotland will have no official presence at the event.
We asked Alan Grant of EventScotland who are looking after the golf marketing activity at European Tour events who confirmed that there is no VisitScotland presence at the event this year.
He advised that VisitScotland were looking at some online activity - through Google and PPC mainly - around search results for the Irish Open, given the amount of online traffic the event looks like it’s going to generate. This will provide a good opportunity to capitalise and direct traffic towards the VisitScotland website.
He went onto advise that "In terms of presence, our experience of the Irish Open has been very poor in recent years; primarily due to the location of the tournament (away from the main areas of population) and specifically the footfall on to the pavilion when we were present, which was in the low 100s as opposed to the high 100s/1,000s that we experience at other Tour events. Clearly it looks like this year there is a lot more media interest around the Irish Open, however we couldn’t have predicated this at the end of last year when we were planning our schedule of events for 2012."
Our concern about this is the Royal Portrush venue for the Irish Open was announced in January of this year and with the high flying Irish golfers holding Majors it was a certainty that this event would be massive. That was never in any question and all you needed to do was ask any of the Scottish based golf tour operators. How come our tourist board can spend £7 million on a cartoon yet can't maintain a presence at the biggest attended golf event Northern Ireland has ever hosted?
Too close to the launch of Brave did I hear you say? Don't want to confuse our market place with mixed messages?
Are we so leaden of foot that our golf marketing bodies cannot divert some expenditure and activity to such a high profile event in such a lucrative "staycation" market place with six months clear notice?
It is so indicative again of the lack of joined up thinking that exists within the marketing of Scotland as the Home of Golf. A whole host of vested interests with fixed plans, aims and objectives and no apparent desire to act quickly to take chances as they arise. And as much as it pains me to ask the question where was the direction from the local and national golf industry bodies on this one too? Are operators again just sitting back and expecting others to do the job for them?
Did it never cross anyone's mind when the exhibition and events schedules were being planned that The Irish Open with Clarke, McIlroy and McDowell all playing may have been worth being at? That there may have been rather a lot of golfers within a two hour reach of our product who could be persuaded to visit again?
Now whilst I think that the private sector should be leading on such promotions, VisitScotland have been doing rather a lot of competitions and offers recently. Why therefore, no thought to a data collecting exercise with the Belfast Telegraph in conjunction with Stena or P&O for a three night three round prize to Ayrshire?
China more important or a visit to Dubai more fun? Causeway Coast not sexy enough as a venue?
The idea, as we approach 2014, that we have got our golf marketing act together is quite ridiculous. We have more golf are and regional groups all over the country doing their own thing with more and more public sector finance and with less and less communication with each other.
It's increasingly now about displacement of visitors pitching destination Highland against Fife against North East against Ayrshire against East Lothian. All spending (public) money to compete against each other and none of the activity fitting into a bigger picture. Duplication and displacement. This is the new lean tourism fighting machine that the new VisitScotland leadership promised. Reality check.
When are the industry going to demand that the situation changes and take greater ownership of their own product marketing? Golf Tourism Scotland - surely it's over to you now?
July 3rd sees the National Forum hosted and organised by Golf Tourism Scotland bringing together keynote speakers from the golf industry to discuss some of the key issues and challenges facing the sector. Speakers will include Fergus Ewing, Minister for Energy, Enterprise & Tourism, John Parker, Ryder Cup Travel Services and Malcolm Roughead, VisitScotland.
Let's hope the industry members attending the event have the balls to ask the questions and demand straight answers.
Monday, 25 June 2012
Wednesday, 13 June 2012
Food Operations Manager for Simpsinns Ayrshire
Ayrshire based Hotel and Restaurant group have recently announced the appointment of Kevin McGillivray as Food operations Manager.
Kevin is a renowned chef in his own right and
recently joined the family-owned SimpsInns group as the new Food
Operations Manager after his most recent position as Executive Chef at
the Marine Hotel in Troon.
Kevin
brings a wealth of experience to the role and is currently President of
the Federation of Chefs Scotland. He is also a former Scottish Chef of
the Year and winner of the prestigious Flavour of Scotland. His
illustrious list of achievements also includes Scottish Hotel Chef of
the Year.
Kevin is seen on the right explaining some new dishes to the Gailes Restaurant team.
The
position of Food Operations Manager is a newly created role within
SimpsInns and is due to the continued expansion and success of the
company.
This
year the vibrant Si!:Café:Bar:Restaurant will open on the Kilwinning
Road in Irvine, while the company recently took ownership of The
Riverside Inn just south of Ayr.
The
innovative Si! Shack concept – to provide a new food offering in the
private garden and covered veranda area - at the Waterside is also due
to open in the coming months.
“One
of the big reasons for taking on this new role with SimpsInns was the
enthusiasm and passion for food within the company,” explained Kevin at a
recent food tasting experience with staff members at the Gailes.
Thursday, 31 May 2012
Google + Local vs VisitScotland New Site
When we asked the question of VisitScotland several months ago in relation to why they were creating a search engine for Scotland when a perfectly good one called Scotland was already in place they pooh poohed the question as being irrelevant. Even when pushed specifically about the forthcoming launch of Google Hotel Finder it was dismissed as being a non issue.
Well here we are some nine maybe twelve months later with a new VisitScotland website launched four weeks ago and the launch today of Google + Local.
Try it yourself and see how irrelevant it all is now. If you were a visitor which one do you think works best for you?
We tried searching for "Visitor Attractions Edinburgh" on VisitScotland.com and on Google + Local. The former returned 89000 responses! Yup a new redesigned website returned nearly ninety thousand entries!! That will make it easy to narrow down the plans fro tomorrow then...
The folly of such massive multi million pound public investment has never been so stark. This is not much short of a scandal. And yet again they ignored all of the warnings.
We tired Search Results for "Visitor Attractions Edinburgh" on both pages.
Find out more about Google + Local on the Google site
We are currently writing a toolkit for Scottish Tourism Businesses - follow TourismMatters on Facebook to get details of the download when it goes live.
Well here we are some nine maybe twelve months later with a new VisitScotland website launched four weeks ago and the launch today of Google + Local.
Try it yourself and see how irrelevant it all is now. If you were a visitor which one do you think works best for you?
We tried searching for "Visitor Attractions Edinburgh" on VisitScotland.com and on Google + Local. The former returned 89000 responses! Yup a new redesigned website returned nearly ninety thousand entries!! That will make it easy to narrow down the plans fro tomorrow then...
The folly of such massive multi million pound public investment has never been so stark. This is not much short of a scandal. And yet again they ignored all of the warnings.
We tired Search Results for "Visitor Attractions Edinburgh" on both pages.
Find out more about Google + Local on the Google site
We are currently writing a toolkit for Scottish Tourism Businesses - follow TourismMatters on Facebook to get details of the download when it goes live.
Thursday, 10 May 2012
VisitScotland £5 million Spend on Retail Products
It's great what you can find in Board papers. These paragrpahs are lifted directly from Visit Scotland's December minutes.
Now I'm not for a second suggesting wrong doing or illegality. It's simply that the volume of contracted merchndise being bought by a single public secotr body must surely be hurting retailers somehwhere in Scotland.
Is this all for Visitor Information Centres? The question is surely whether this is what the public sector purse should be doing.
Read Full Minutes if You Wish Here
Now I'm not for a second suggesting wrong doing or illegality. It's simply that the volume of contracted merchndise being bought by a single public secotr body must surely be hurting retailers somehwhere in Scotland.
Is this all for Visitor Information Centres? The question is surely whether this is what the public sector purse should be doing.
The Director of Corporate Services introduced a paper seeking approval for the following:Now to see if I can find what I was really looking for!
a) Approve the award of a framework contract for Supply of Retail products (Lot 1 Books & Maps) to Bookspeed, Lomond and Nicolson Maps for a maximum period of 48 months and a maximum collaborative value of £4,400,000
b) Approve the award of a framework contract for Supply of Retail products (Lot 2 Postcards) to Colin Baxter Photography Ltd, Lomond and Stirling Gallery for a maximum period of 48 months and a maximum collaborative value of £660,000
c) Approve the award of a framework contract for Supply of Retail products (Lot 3 Calendars) to Colin Baxter Photography Ltd and Lomond for a maximum period of 48 months and a maximum value of £440,000
The total maximum value of the contract across all three lots will be £5,500,000.
Read Full Minutes if You Wish Here
Are VisitScotland Continuing to Play Unfairly?
You've unmasked the masquerade that's been
present in the UK for more than a decade, brought to heel now by EU
Competition Law that came into force late 2009 with the Lisbon Treaty.
The result has been central government's cut in VisitBritain's funding as part of the spending review - VB was operating at a £0.7m deficit - forcing abandonment of the National Tourism Open Platform together with associated systems that found UK government on the wrong side of the law. It was also a factor in the dismantling of development agencies that were funding local government DMOs using the same systems, which saw them too acting illegally.
The US equivalent of EU Competition Law is the Sherman Antitrust Act that came into effect in 1890. It underpins the American culture of innovation through open market competition and is why we have Apple, Google, TripAdvisor, Facebook, Twitter - I could go on. All these supranationals lie at the very heart of both international and intranational tourism marketing as we know it today. It's the reason why TBIDs in the US are more likely to succeed, whilst any in the UK are unlikely to because the culture's all wrong. Hypothecated taxation is not the issue. It's the ability to use the funding in a commercial environment where all marketing must lead to a sale.
This brings us back to the earlier question: was it poor performance that brought about the demise of the old DMOs? For this we must ignore the 'government marketer' oxymoron and consider who were the beneficiaries. Once this is clear, the question can be answered and the future of DMOs can be better determined. So here we go...
At the turn of the millennium, government-funded DMOs were intended as Destination Management Organisations. What happened next was a game changer. A handful of technology companies that had developed online booking systems, responded to government tenders that were to see their technologies embedded in DMO websites. It saw DMOs morph overnight into Destination Marketing Systems, bringing them into a space occupied by the private sector and finding them in competition with online travel agents (OTAs). Neither the bureaucrats nor the politicians had the wit to understand the economic consequences and legal implications.
Having built their new websites with booking systems in place, it became a political imperative for the DMOs to attract traffic to them and generate booking enquiries for tourism businesses listed on their sites. Using taxpayers' money they competed with the OTAs for popular keyphrases using pay-per-click (PPC), thus driving up the bidding prices that could only be recovered by the OTAs in commission charges to businesses.
With DMOs having none of their own products to sell, the only way booking enquiries could be converted to sales was to refer them direct to businesses listed on their websites or, and here's the rub, to OTAs nominated by the businesses to process the enquiries on their behalf for a commission payable on the booking value.
The twist, however, was that the technology suppliers to the DMOs were also OTAs in their own right, nominated to process the enquiries, and technology suppliers to other nominated OTAs. It takes a moment to realise the full implications. In effect, the technology suppliers had three interwoven income streams. One from the taxpayer for the systems; a second from the businesses for the bookings, and a third from other OTAs using their systems. All in a day's work and we must take our hats off to those who drafted the legal Agreements. But not so smart of the DMOs.
The result has been central government's cut in VisitBritain's funding as part of the spending review - VB was operating at a £0.7m deficit - forcing abandonment of the National Tourism Open Platform together with associated systems that found UK government on the wrong side of the law. It was also a factor in the dismantling of development agencies that were funding local government DMOs using the same systems, which saw them too acting illegally.
The US equivalent of EU Competition Law is the Sherman Antitrust Act that came into effect in 1890. It underpins the American culture of innovation through open market competition and is why we have Apple, Google, TripAdvisor, Facebook, Twitter - I could go on. All these supranationals lie at the very heart of both international and intranational tourism marketing as we know it today. It's the reason why TBIDs in the US are more likely to succeed, whilst any in the UK are unlikely to because the culture's all wrong. Hypothecated taxation is not the issue. It's the ability to use the funding in a commercial environment where all marketing must lead to a sale.
This brings us back to the earlier question: was it poor performance that brought about the demise of the old DMOs? For this we must ignore the 'government marketer' oxymoron and consider who were the beneficiaries. Once this is clear, the question can be answered and the future of DMOs can be better determined. So here we go...
At the turn of the millennium, government-funded DMOs were intended as Destination Management Organisations. What happened next was a game changer. A handful of technology companies that had developed online booking systems, responded to government tenders that were to see their technologies embedded in DMO websites. It saw DMOs morph overnight into Destination Marketing Systems, bringing them into a space occupied by the private sector and finding them in competition with online travel agents (OTAs). Neither the bureaucrats nor the politicians had the wit to understand the economic consequences and legal implications.
Having built their new websites with booking systems in place, it became a political imperative for the DMOs to attract traffic to them and generate booking enquiries for tourism businesses listed on their sites. Using taxpayers' money they competed with the OTAs for popular keyphrases using pay-per-click (PPC), thus driving up the bidding prices that could only be recovered by the OTAs in commission charges to businesses.
With DMOs having none of their own products to sell, the only way booking enquiries could be converted to sales was to refer them direct to businesses listed on their websites or, and here's the rub, to OTAs nominated by the businesses to process the enquiries on their behalf for a commission payable on the booking value.
The twist, however, was that the technology suppliers to the DMOs were also OTAs in their own right, nominated to process the enquiries, and technology suppliers to other nominated OTAs. It takes a moment to realise the full implications. In effect, the technology suppliers had three interwoven income streams. One from the taxpayer for the systems; a second from the businesses for the bookings, and a third from other OTAs using their systems. All in a day's work and we must take our hats off to those who drafted the legal Agreements. But not so smart of the DMOs.
Wednesday, 9 May 2012
Scottish Hotels Can Now Lead The Mobile World
Bookassist Announces Major Upgrade to Industry-Leading Mobile Webapp for Hotels
Bookassist has announced a major upgrade to their industry-leading
mobile webapp solution for hotels and hotel groups. Following the
original release in early 2010, Mobile Webapp V2 has been completely
re-engineered to take advantage of the latest mobile technologies.
Hundreds of hotels already use Bookassist's mobile solution and will
receive an automatic upgrade to the new platform today.
Ian McCaig Managing Partner for Bookassist in Scotland was quoted on Facebook saying, "This really does change the game for Scottish hotels looking to have the most relevant mobile version website around. It is available for hotels currently using Bookassist but can also provide Scottish hotels not currently using Bookassist's booking engine with a leading edge mobile site for the summer traffic. Just imagine your potential guests tired from the London Olympic grind easily booking your hotel on the ground..."
"We're seeing more and more of Scotland's larger hotels getting in touch to find out more about the marketing and conversion power of the booking engine and the new app simply reinforces that as a company we are committed to innovation and fulfilling the needs of the online customer whether at a desk on a laptop or a mobile device"
"This also provides a superb and cost effective method for large, and even chain, city centre hotels to ensure that they have a genuinely professional mobile presence for business and lesiure travellers coming through Scotland's airports in Olympic year. Bookassist mobile can act as another direct sales channel and allows them to compete more effectively against the high cost OTA's"
Re-built from the ground up
"Since the first release of our mobile solution just a few short years ago, mobile use in travel has changed dramatically", said Dr Des O'Mahony, Bookassist CEO. "We've re-built our mobile platform from scratch to be even more compatible with the proliferation of smart phones out there and to allow hotels to provide a much higher level of service to their mobile customers."
"People on mobile have specific needs and limited time. A mobile solution needs to be far more focused on your mobile customers’ specific needs than a website. Bookassist Mobile Webapp V2 is exactly that, and we've shown again with this release that we continue to lead the way in mobile innovation for hotels."
Social Media Integration
By tapping the new “Social” button on Mobile Webapp V2, hotel customers can view and interact with Facebook, Twitter and YouTube streams for the hotel right within the webapp. Hotels can publish their reviews on the web app so that customers feel more reassured before making a booking.
Booking on mobile is simple on Bookassist Mobile Webapp V2. From choosing rooms to completing a booking takes just a few taps. The system also includes Special Offers that hotels can customise for their mobile guests using the Bookassist Administration System.
More Smartphones SupportedBookassist Mobile Webapp V2 runs on all the major mobile platforms so hotels can service their customers no matter what their choice of handset. Mobile Webapp V2 is built using cross-platform HTML5 and related technologies such as Ajax, which means it supports the latest versions of Apple iOS on iPhone, Google Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, Bada, Symbian, Palm webOS, MeeGo and others.
Existing Mobile Webapp customers with Bookassist receive this upgrade automatically and without additional cost. For new customers in Scotland they should contact Ian McCaig at Bookassist.
For more details, see bookassist.org/mobile.
Thursday, 3 May 2012
Tourism Matters Goes Multi Lingual
While it's not a perfect tool, Google Translate has improved beyond recognition and if we're being pretty blunt about it, some of the English written on blogs and web pages is so bad that translation may give it clearer meaning anyway!
So Google have added it to Blogger now and that means this article can now be read across the world! Hmmmm - doesn't mean it will unfortunately!
So Google have added it to Blogger now and that means this article can now be read across the world! Hmmmm - doesn't mean it will unfortunately!
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