Date :
22/05/2013
Some 340 people gathered at Glasgow Science Centre for the event, dubbed ‘Preparing to Welcome the World – Tourism, a Natural Fit for Scotland’.
“We’ve never had so many at a tourism conference in my experience,” says Scottish Tourism Alliance Chairman Stephen Leckie, “we reached a total of 9,500 people during the week, many of them through ScotHot at SECC Glasgow.”
Stephen believes the week demonstrated that the Scottish tourism industry has reached a moment of unprecedented promise.
“Government and public sector bodies now realise the magnitude of tourism and its significance to the economy, to a degree they never have before. And never before have we had a strategy led by people in the private sector who really get the industry, and are coming to it with a fresh pair of eyes.”
Beyond the week itself, Stephen continues to present the Tourism Scotland 2020 vision at events across the country – such as a recent day-long summit on Bute, which attracted 140 delegates from Argyll and the Isles.
However, he accepts that there’s still a lot of work to do to help businesses of all sizes understand Tourism Scotland 2020 and their part in it.
“Inevitably it’s a complex strategy, but we’ve made it as simple as we possibly could,” he says.
“What I would say to time-poor tourism businesses is to absorb the element of the strategy most relevant to them, and ask themselves: what am I going to do differently?”