Why it’s crucial city grabs a piece of the tourism action (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Why it’s crucial city grabs a piece of the tourism action

9:19am Wednesday 8th July 2009

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Welcome To Yorkshire, formerly the Yorkshire Tourist Board, hosted a conference for more than 1,000 invited guests earlier this year.

The purpose of the bash at The Royal Armouries in Leeds was to announce to the world a three-year, £30m advertising and promotional campaign, aimed at boosting Yorkshire’s tourism business, worth an estimated £6.3 billion a year to more than 250,000 people in 25,000 businesses.

Star of the occasion wasn’t former England and Yorkshire cricket captain Michael Vaughan, who has since announced his retirement. That accolade belonged to Gary Verity, chief executive of Welcome To Yorkshire. A Yorkshireman himself, his passion for and belief in the cause were manifest.

He said: “The initial results of the campaign, which is designed to run for the whole of 2009, have been good. The TV advert is now being seen by quite a lot of people and will run again on terrestrial TV.

“The website – yorkshire.com – has had a three-fold increase over the last two or three weeks. We hope this will lead to an increase in visitors. People have been telling us that visitors are up 20 per cent on last year. How much of that is due to the weather or campaigning, we don’t know.”

The website subsequently won a national award.

“The important thing is that we continue to pile in hard. We had complaints from the South-West that we were stealing their customers. That’s nonsense. We are giving customers a choice. We are putting a few noses out of joint.

“A lot of my time is spent talking at tourism summits telling local authorities what can be done.

“Of all the six Area Tourist Partnerships, the one that needs to step up to the plate is West Yorkshire. That is the one ATP that has under-performed.

“High-level discussions are taking place to resolve that in a short space of time. Other areas have tourism figureheads. South Yorkshire, for example, has Richard Jones as chief executive. You need a local person on the ground that everyone can look to for leadership. We are putting pressure on them to change that.

“Tourism is very important in the way that a city and an area feels about itself. It’s not just about visitor numbers actually: it’s about what you can do to create an atmosphere and give a city a buzz.

“The main thing is to have a campaign, not just comparing yourself to other cities. The message is: be a player. You can debate as long as you like about the content of our TV adverts, but we never had one before. Now we have.

“I used to work at Arndale House in Charles Street in Bradford, and lived in Burley-in-Wharfedale, so I got a bit of a sense of the city. I think you go back to Bradford now and bits of the centre are missing.

“I would encourage the various leaders of agencies in the city to use tourism as the mechanism for making Bradford feel good about itself, for the people who work in the city and the people who live there. Use tourism to lead Bradford out of the recession and make the place feel positive.”

Are there any unlikely examples where this has happened?

“Hull: this is one area where the city council has worked very hard pushing the place as a maritime city. Scarborough has really reinvented itself over the past few years. It has the fastest broadband in the UK and won an award as the most enterprising destination in the UK.

“This is really an example of a place that has used the visitor economy at the heart of the renaissance of the place.”

Scarborough won the European award for enterprise, and not long after that Bradford was made UNESCO’s first City of Film. Other things are about to happen too.

The West Yorkshire Tourist Partnership is about to sign a new business plan with Welcome To Yorkshire which will bring in £500,000 for tourism promotion in the first year. A chief executive for the body is expected to be appointed and in situ by the end of September.

Colin Philpott, director of Bradford’s National Media Museum and a member of the West Yorkshire body, is to lead a working group looking into culture and how it can be used to further tourism and regeneration.

If anyone locally needs a reminder of what can be done, a short trip to Sheffield might help.

Gary said: “I used to work there more than ten years ago. I got a shock when I went back there in the autumn. Somebody has put a lot of serious thought into this. It’s quite inspiring.

“What they have done is gone very big on business tourism – conferences, conventions (you only need 50 to a 100 people) and events like the World Snooker Championship. They have done what they can in a realistic way. A lot of it has been built around the growth of the university.”

Factfile

Gary Verity is chief executive of Welcome To Yorkshire, the rebranded Yorkshire Tourist Board, now based in Leeds.

He was born in Leeds 45 years ago. Home is a farm in Carlton in Coverdale, near Leyburn, with wife Helen and daughter Lily.

He is the former group managing director of design and printing outfits Prontaprint and Kall Kwik, and managing director of Johnsons Cleaners UK.

For two years he ran Bradford & Bingley’s Retail Property Services, turning round four years of losses into profit and sell-off.

He has also worked in Hong Kong, Spain, Holland, Italy and Ireland.

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