Visit Scotland | Alba

Good for the Soul | our visitor proposition

We have launched our new visitor proposition, Good for the Soul. A visitor proposition allows us to showcase the many reasons why a visitor should choose Scotland.

Visitors from around the world are seeking meaningful and sustainable travel experiences. There’s a particular interest and volume of visitors from the UK, France, Germany, and the United States. Our approach is to provide a framework to better reach our potential visitors.

Visiting Scotland can have a profound effect on your wellbeing.  Its natural surroundings provide a calming and rejuvenating effect for both mind and body.  Immersing yourself in its rich heritage, helps connect you with the past and fosters a deeper sense of belonging and responsibility.

Our visitor proposition aims to provide a framework, around which we can tell our stories and forge deeper connections with visitors seeking meaningful travel experiences.

In this article:

What's driving our activity?

In order to reach the right audiences with the right messages, we need to understand what is driving visitor decisions and behaviours.

Visitors are seeking more meaningful travel experiences with a deeper understanding of their impact on their own and the planets’ wellbeing.

With Scotland famed for its iconic and breathtaking natural beauty, our proposition offers new, exciting and, critically, sustainable business opportunities.

“Sustainable tourism” has been identified as a key growth sector in Scotland. There is a clear opportunity to build upon an existing competitive advantage to further productivity and economic impact. Nature-based tourism is one of the fastest-growing tourism sectors in Europe.

To protect our places and communities against the negative impacts of climate change we can come together to leverage tourism as a force for good. Our focus is on responsible and regenerative experiences. These enrich our visitors’ experiences, our neighbourhoods, and our land.

Visitors from around the world are seeking meaningful and sustainable travel experiences. The benefits of these types of experiences offset the cost, often perceived to be good value for money. Data suggests visitors are happy to spend more for personalised, memorable experiences.

 

Our promotional video, showcasing the Good for the Soul visitor proposition.

Key statistics

#1

Natural beauty is the number 1 driver of global travel decisions

45%

of global consumers look for a relaxation and wellbeing space in their next travel destination

42%

of UK residents said their top driver for trips in Scotland in late 2023 was to get away from it all

Sources: Ipsos NBI 2023, YouGov 2023, VisitScotland Domestic Sentiment Tracker 2023.

How does our proposition affect our marketing?

Our visitor proposition helps to bring our stories to life. We want to spotlight people in connection with nature and to showcase some of the following unique, powerfully enriching, personal experiences that visitors seek:

  • our rich larder and heritage
  • our vibrant culture and traditions
  • our unique natural environment
  • our welcoming neighbourhoods
  • our changing seasons

Our audiences are open to more sustainable options; ones that are good for people and the planet. But it's also important to us that we don't place all the responsibility of making more sustainable travel choices on to the consumer.

We must play a leading and proactive role in:

  • offering more sustainable and community-focused choices
  • shaping our visitor behaviours

 

 

Creatively, we are leaning into the natural assets that make us unique and, critically, how they make us feel:

  • our geography and topography
  • our native flora and fauna
  • our fresh water and fresh air
  • our seasonal light and weather
  • our provenance and heritage

We showcase the very things that make Scotland so distinctive and special.

By doing so, we hope to instil a respect for our natural environment and wildlife that translates into more considered travel choices and behaviours.

In essence, we aim to foster an understanding that a visit can be good for the place and good for the soul.

Our creative

Our visual content draws on sight, sound, and touch as creative devices to frame our storytelling. It seeks to put the human and the experience at the heart of our content. Our written content applies sensory language that seeks to immerse the reader into the experience and activate the senses.

Find out more about our visual approach.

Gallery item 0 Gallery item 1 Gallery item 2 Gallery item 3

What are our marketing objectives?

We want to grow the value of tourism to Scotland with a focus on:

  • positioning Scotland as an inclusive, year-round destination that delivers powerfully enriching personal experiences

  • prioritising key markets and audiences to grow Scotland’s share of global travel in a sustainable way

  • increasing the value per visit

Success will be measured by achieving our four key outcomes:

  • spread

  • spend

  • sustainability

  • satisfaction

Our markets and audiences

We prioritise markets where our resources drive the most value to Scotland. Our year-round marketing delivers across 13 global markets, with our owned and partner activity extending this reach further still.

Over the coming year, our paid marketing activity will focus on the markets of UK, US, France, and Germany.

Our marketing tactics

Our marketing tactics focus on the following six key areas.

Insight driven and targeted

We match demand with supply across regional and sector priorities.  Our proposition is focused on:

  • targeting the life stages, attitudes and behaviours within key markets
  • reaching prospective visitors at each stage of the visitor journey

Integrated

Our marketing activities are year-round, via our own communication channels and that of our partners. They include PR and intermediary marketing activities (working with key tour operators, agents, and transport partners).

User and channel first

Our content is designed for the audience and channel in mind, based on market motivators, such as:

  • United States - film and TV, and ancestry
  • UK - connecting with family and friends
  • global - wellbeing and escapism

They are crafted to optimise performance within their environment.

Seasonally weighted

Our paid marketing activations are timed for:

  • optimal engagement with visitors when there’s the highest chance of turning "lookers" into "bookers"
  • encouraging visits out with the peak season.

This is done in two key phases, September - November and January - March, to encourage winter 2024 and spring 2025 bookings.

Global campaign activity

Our paid media distribution for 2024-2025 will focus on the UK, US, France, and Germany. It will target "experience seekers" at each stage of the visitor journey.

Browse the experience seeker pen portraits PDF on visitbritain.org.

We’re working with key online travel agency partners to reach travel ready audiences where they are looking for and booking travel, ensuring Scotland is front of mind.

These partnerships give us invaluable data and insights to help refine our planning and targeting to support seasonal and regional spread. Our online travel agency partnerships include:

  • Expedia - helping us reach and encourage bookings among their warm travel-ready audiences in the UK and US
  • Skyscanner - helping us target a large, engaged, and active German visitor audience to promote direct flights into Scotland and encourage bookings
  • Tripadvisor - helping us to influence and encourage bookings from UK and French visitors

We're working with a number of destination partners who are upweighting these activities with more localised messaging. By targeting audiences who are already warm to Scotland, we are able to extend that sentiment to a more regionalised focus.

Find out more about our partnership with Expedia.

Partnerships

We work with partners aligned with our strategic goals, to deliver collective reach and impact.  Partners include key rail operators:

  • Avanti
  • Caledonian Sleeper
  • LNER
  • ScotRail

 

Example of a partnership activity with Caledonian Sleeper.

How to get involved

Our new visitor proposition

Discover how to get involved and utilise our new visitor proposition, Good for the Soul.

Read More

Related links

Previous campaigns

View some of our previous marketing campaigns, which have taken Scotland to the world.

Our marketing strategy

We seek to show Scotland as an inclusive, all year-round destination. Find out about our marketing strategy and how it shapes our approach to…

Our target markets

Find out about our focus markets and how we target marketing to specific audiences.