Visit Scotland | Alba

The travel trade play a crucial role in helping international visitors to choose a destination, as well as to plan and book their trip.

By travel trade, we mean travel intermediaries such as tour operators and travel agents.

More than half of international visitors use these kind of travel intermediaries to plan and book their holiday. That's why our targeted intermediary marketing programme forms a key part of our marketing strategy.

This page will offer you a brief overview of some of our key activities as well as links to further information.

Tourists dine in Hutchesons City Grill, Glasgow.

What are our activities?

We want to help grow our markets sustainably. So, part of our activity is informing and inspiring the travel trade through several touchpoints, such as:

  • key account management and partnerships with travel trade in our focus markets   
  • business development missions (these bring focus to certain markets and let Scottish tourism businesses meet with the overseas travel trade)
  • participation in key global travel trade events, such as World Travel Market (these provide an opportunity to present Scottish tourism products to overseas buyers)
  • hosting our flagship travel trade event, VisitScotland Connect (there, over 200 international buyers have the opportunity to meet over 200 suppliers in Scotland)
  • hosting a programme of familiarisation trips to allow buyers to experience product first hand
  • delivery of destination and product awareness training sessions to influential travel trade

  • engaging with our worldwide travel trade database through our monthly trade newsletter

  • publish educational and inspirational content for the travel trade on traveltrade.visitscotland.org

Why our activities matter

Our activities ensure that overseas operator portfolios include responsible Scotland product and programmes.

This raises awareness for Scotland as a destination. It also encourages the travel trade to feature Scotland ahead of competitor destinations. And it allows us to support the tourism industry in its aspirations to attract overseas visitors.

Read more on traveltrade.visitscotland.org

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