Three new research reports now available
The following new research and statistics reports are now available on British Destinations.net:
From VisitsBritain: their Inbound quarterly Trends (quarter 1 July) and latest Foresight report 154: The Visitor Experience in Britain – Welcome, Expectations, Satisfaction & Recommendation. These can be found at the head of paragraphs 2 and 3 respectively of our protected VB page at: https://britishdestinations.net/members-area/content/visitbritain-november-2013-latest-edition-of-forsights-and-vb-trend-updates/ . Both are necessarily higher level reports with detail down to Nations and Regions level, on page 21 in the Quarterly Trends and pages 23 and 31 of Foresights. If you can’t remember the log in email me here.
From the National Coastal Tourism Academy (NCTA): Perceptions of the English Coast – Identifying Opportunities for Domestic Non-Visitors. (Applicable to all coastal destinations, regardless of location and possibly some relevance inland?). Based on an online survey of 1,506 respondents who had not visited the coast for an overnight stay in the last 5 years and detailed interviews with 23 of the respondents, the objective was to identify the barriers that could be addressed, which non-visitors might be open to staying on the English coast and which types of destination and activities would be most relevant to them.
Relative to the scale of the English Coastal product, it is necessarily broad-based, and arguably therefore lacks some of the more specific planning data, for example, segment size, values and location. Some colleagues have also expressed various reservations about the 6 imaged based “coastal types” used. Nonetheless, the report undoubtedly fills an important gap. Many destinations, coastal or otherwise, will conduct their own segmentation research to support routine activity or for specific projects and development programmes. Of these far fewer will have been able to go to the expense of undertaking non-visitor research and where they have it may not have been done recently.
The report’s recommendations and findings, although in part already self-evident to many working coastal destinations, are still extremely useful, not least in helping destinations confirm and/or evidence their current approaches, activities and event programmes etc. Other destinations may find pointers towards new markets and activities they have not yet been able to support, although I suspect more detailed local research might be required to fully justify the resource needed to create, say, a new major event like an air show, as the report’s covering press release suggests as a means of converting day to staying visitors.
The findings on perceptions (long standing?) of poor weather, relative expense and elements of the coastal experience, either not being available or closed in winter is worthy of further investigation and it may well then be more effectively addressed collaboratively at a national level than by individual destination’s actions? The report is at https://britishdestinations.net/1194-2/content/perceptions-of-the-english-coast-identifying-opportunities-for-domestic-non-visitors-2017/ .
British Destinations 