A Lesson Learned - Big Changes at VisitScotland.com
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Loading ...Earlier in February I wrote about the role of the DMO and the lesson learned from VisitScotland.com. That post received a number of comments back that added more depth to the conversation. Today there was an announcement from Visit Scotland that the VisitScotland.com website would be changing the way it does busy to better support the grassroots tour operators. Ofcourse, the small operators are ecstatic about the change and are praising the work of organizations like ReclaimVS.com who petitioned to have VisitScotland.com returned to public control. The big issue for many was the fact that the eTourism, a company jointly owned by Tiscover and VisitScotland, controlled which products were given preferential treatment in the system and as a result, many operators derived no benefit from the marketing efforts for which they were paying either through membership fees or taxes. The change means that all operators are now equally represented in the listing service provided by VisitScotland.com and the focus will be less on driving traffic to the call centre and more on driving visitors to the region. In my opinion, a move in the right direction and a clear validation of my stand that DMOs and RMOs need to look at cooperative and not competitive approaches to increasing stakeholder value.
Read more about the recent announcement at TravelMole.
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Written by Stephen Joyce · Tags dmo, marketing, visitscotland · Filed Under Destinations ·
A bit late in replying to this one but here goes…
I think we need to be wary at this stage about exactly what these changes involve. I understand that they will be fully explained shortly but that not withstanding, my thoughts would be as follows:
I think there might be a hygiene issue here. VS.com ‘vetted’ its companies as being up to minimum standards - with a free for all approach that would seem to no longer apply.
But does this matter any more or should we just have faith in the market and tripadvisor to sort out the good from the bad? There has historically been concern in Scotland that poor facilities and poor service has created a bad image for the whole country and so I think a carrot and stick approach was taken to encourage operators to improve their offering.
Ignoring the fact that there is an enormous informal ‘gray’ economy of operators out there who will continue to ignore the message about improved standards, I think the industry does realize that it needs to up its game - which is often more than can be said for the secondary business such as shops and cafes which can still leave much to be desired.
I’m not sure its true to say that some businesses in the VisitScotland.com system received preferential treatment over others but am open to receive examples of this happening.
Finally, if I paid for advertising in a paper for my business and that advertising didn’t deliver the business, I think my approach would be to try alternative marketing, not demand the the paper to be nationalized.
In the Travelmole article, Alan Keith from ReclaimVs.com stated that the change to VisitScotland.com meant “Database results are returned on a random basis, with no precedence given to those giving eTourism ‘allocation’ of rooms on which to take undeclared commission.” This infers that preferential treatment was given to certain suppliers although, like you mention, there is no specific evidence of this.
I do agree with you that the part of the role of the DMO could be to vet the supplier and ensure they are up to a minimum standard before being accepted into the program. TourismBC and Tourism Vancouver both have a similar program that provides an “Approved Accommodation” certification. At the very least, this provides the traveler with some kind of assurance that the hotel/motel has met a standard recognized by an impartial third party.
In this particular example, it would appear that the primary complaint was that the organization was more focused on selling room nights rather than enhancing or marketing the destination as a whole.