FEATURE: BUSINESS TOURISM
modern cities and historical landmarks – there is something to suit everyone and every mood. Tourism has, at last, been recognised as a vital economic driver. A definite ‘hot topic’, the first ever tourism policy was recently launched by the Government with the aim of attracting an extra four million visitors to Britain over the next four years. Backed by £100 million-worth of marketing it’s a serious ambition.
Talking Tourism T
he West and North Yorkshire regions offer visitors to both these events a rich diversity of attractions. From the natural beauty of the Dales, moors and seaside cliff tops to the busy
On a national basis, more than 200,000 businesses are directly involved in tourism providing £52 billion gross domestic product and 4.4% of UK jobs. Tourism alone accounts for almost £90 billion in direct spending each year.
But what of Yorkshire – England’s largest county, with a population of 5.5 million – equal to that of Scotland and twice that of Wales? In September 2011, Mintel’s annual British lifestyles survey rated Yorkshire as the happiest place to live in the UK. Maybe the happiness factor is one of the attractions of our region. Tourism is the county’s third largest industry and continues to support a quarter of a million jobs and more than 25,000 businesses. Since Welcome to Yorkshire was launched in 2009, the value of Yorkshire’s tourism has increased from £5.9 billion to £7 billion, adding more than £1 billion to the economy. Four thousand new jobs have also been created in Yorkshire’s tourism industry. Funding for Welcome to Yorkshire will cease in April 2012 and it remains to be seen how Local enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) will work with the private and public sectors to plug the £10m a year gap. According to independent research from ‘Visit England’, in the first quarter of 2011 visits to Yorkshire were up 14% on the same period in 2010, compared with just a 5% increase throughout the UK as a whole. During the same period, length-of- stay increased by 15% in Yorkshire, compared with a 2% decrease nationally. Yorkshire also experienced a 25% growth in visitor spend,
44 WEST & NORTH YORKSHIRE CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE 2011
2012 is a big year for Britain. Not only will the Olympics put the entire country on the global stage but the Queen’s diamond jubilee will also raise the UK’s profile. Millions around the world will see England as an important destination for both business and pleasure.
compared with just 5% for the UK, with overseas spending at 70%, compared with a 7% expenditure increase in the UK overall.
There are approximately 215 million visits to Yorkshire every year – more than Disney worldwide! In a recent House of Commons address, tourism minister John Penrose, said: “Tourism involves a very large number of small and medium-sized businesses, and it is wrong to try to treat the industry as a single organisation. It will be a bottom-up, organic approach, through which local destinations can say: ‘This is what we need in our area’. What is right for Harrogate will be different from what is right for York or Scarborough. That is entirely correct, and the people best placed to understand the different responsibilities and priorities in each area are inevitably the businesses that operate in those local markets.”
Getting down to business Whilst tourism in general is holding out well for Yorkshire, how does the business tourism sector stand in comparison?
Ten years ago, expenditure by business visitors exceeded, for the first time ever, that of leisure visitors, representing 31.7% of all spend compared with 29% of spend by holiday visitors. The British Tourist Authority projected that, by 2010, expenditure by business visitors could represent as much as 45% of total inbound tourism spend. Last year, the annual UK Events Markets Trends Survey (UKEMTS) – which collates data supplied by venues across the country – revealed in September that West Yorkshire bucked the national trend in 2010, with growth in the business tourism sector. The value to the local economy was up 13% to £615.2m, the number of delegate days up 18% to 8,309,000 and the average number of events per venue up 6%. West Yorkshire is responsible for almost half (49%) of the business tourism events in the whole of Yorkshire. On average 357 business events with a value of £2.3m take place every working day in the sub region.
As well as generating income for hotels and venues, business tourism also contributes to the local economy as delegates spend on transport, dining and entertainment.
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