While the financial sector of the British economy has taken a bashing, the manufacturing and service sectors have reportedly been holding up.

Welcome To Yorkshire, the re-branded tourist board launched last April, endorses the latter claim, pointing out that during the first nine months of 2009, the number of UK people holidaying in Yorkshire was six per cent higher than the national trend of 18 per cent.

And Bradford, according to Welcome To Yorkshire’s Regional Visitor Survey, proved popular for museums and cultural attractions, meaning the National Media Museum, Haworth and World Heritage Site Saltaire.

While this isn’t exactly news – the T&A has run scores of stories on Bradford’s cultural attractions – it is worth reminding ourselves that next month, during the weekend of the opening of the 16th Bradford International Film Festival, something special is planned that will link with a major Welcome To Yorkshire event.

From March 18 to 22, Bradford will be making a big splash about its World City of Film status, awarded by UNESCO on June 12 last year. The timing could not have been better.

On March 22, Welcome To Yorkshire is promising to “blow people away” with major announcements at “the biggest tourism event to be held in the UK”. It’s called Y10, like a code for a secret formula.

More than 1,000 invited guests are expected at Harrogate’s International Centre where Gary Verity, Welcome To Yorkshire’s energetic chief executive, will take to the stage with “high-profile Yorkshire celebrities and politicians” to disclose “exciting news” about the year to come.

We’ll have to wait for the detail. But it is safe to say that tourism, in the past regarded as an adjunct to the real economy of manufacturing and finance, is now seen as a catalyst. Welcome To Yorkshire never tires of reminding journalists that tourism is worth £6.3 billion a year, keeping 250,000 people in work.

The organisation says 24 per cent more UK people are holidaying in Yorkshire; overnight countryside trips are up 23 per cent, while 14 per cent more domestic overnight visits – 8.3m in all – were made from January to September last year.

Mr Verity says: “We want to build on this by working together with all tourism businesses. Our aim is to instil passion in the region and encourage businesses to get on board with our plans to make Yorkshire the top destination in the UK.”

Recently, he took Welcome To Yorkshire’s multi-million pound marketing campaign to the Far East, where he handed over an 1877 edition of Wuthering Heights to Singapore. Emily Bronte’s novel remains immensely popular in that part of the world.

He said: “We are offering a tantalising glimpse of Yorkshire to the wealth of potential tourists. China alone has a fifth of the world’s population and millions of people from China, Hong Kong and Singapore visit London every year. It is but a small step to encourage them to travel to Yorkshire and experience a new view of the UK.”

Japanese people in particular have long had a love affair with Haworth and the Thornton birthplace of the three younger Bronte sisters. In one year, people from 17 different countries were counted at the house in Thornton’s Market Street.

The novels of Emily and her sisters Charlotte and Anne will be distributed to coffee houses in Singapore and elsewhere as part of Welcome To Yorkshire’s drive to use tourism into Yorkshire to boost other sectors of the service economy such as shopping, entertainment, sight-seeing, sports and eating out.

“The impact this will have on visitors to the Bradford district should be substantial,” said a Welcome To Yorkshire spokesman.

The National Media Museum seems to be the focal point of visitor activity to central Bradford. Surveys of some of the 613,923 visitors to the museum last year – approximately 19,000 of them from overseas – indicate that 83 per cent of them came to Bradford specifically to visit the museum and the IMAX cinema.

Next month’s Bradford International Film Festival will bring a few thousand more, including some from abroad.

Last year, for example, 34 film fans from Germany, the United States, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Australia and Switzerland were among the audiences for the films shown during the Widescreen Weekend.