Reveal of draft future tourism strategy
The draft of Scotland’s future tourism strategy was shared with industry delegates at the Scottish Tourism Alliance (STA) Annual Autumn Conference in Edinburgh in October.
This tourism strategy, has unlike TS2020 been developed through an equal partnership approach with a range of stakeholders from industry, Scottish Government and our public agencies. It is reflective of the changing world we live in, our new mindset and approach to how we live and work and represents a bold step forward in setting our industry on a path to delivering benefits to those who visit us, Scotland’s people, the communities within our destinations, local economies, our wider economy and indeed, all of our sectors.
As a result of what is happening in terms of trends, forecasts and future consumer behaviour, there is a need for our tourism industry, government, public sector and communities to collectively respond, adapt and collaborate to deliver a responsible, sustainable, managed growth for the future.
Our mindset as a nation and as a sector is now shifting from attracting volume to delivering greater economic and social benefits for our nation and for our local communities – the people who live and work in all our villages, towns and cities. The people who work in our tourism businesses. The time to change and adapt has come.
Our future national tourism strategy must therefore respond in a different way to address these current and future challenges and maximise the opportunities that we have in our sights in the short, medium and long term; food tourism and protecting the environment being of particular importance in the Highlands.
Our strategy will look to enrich lives and preserve our places with our industry acting as pioneers for delivering responsible tourism. We need to look to build a 21st Century tourism industry for all – our visitors, our people, our businesses, our communities and our environment.
We had just under 450 delegates at our conference and after being introduced to the future strategy, we undertook a round table consultation exercise to glean immediate feedback from those in the room.
We understand that not everyone could be with us to hear the overview of the shape of the draft strategy, so we have a video which will take you through the detail of the announcement and bring you up to speed so that you can also feedback your views.
It is so important that you use your voice to feed into the development of the future strategy – this is a strategy for each and every one of us.
This is what will take our industry on its journey to be the world leader in 21st century tourism.
