Our coordinated Scotland-wide strategic approach educates key audiences to enjoy our countryside responsibly. It pulls together the current and planned actions into a cohesive and aligned direction of travel.
We bundled this in a vision of how the visitor experience will develop over a 10-year period. An action log records progress against our four strategy pillars:
Published March 2021
Published May 2024
The strategy and its implementation is overseen by the strategy steering group that we chair. Other members are:
Subgroups of the steering group bring together regional and national partners. Together, they cover the following three workstreams:
Education and marketing
Operational
Co-ordination
There are also three working groups which feed into the co-ordination subgroup. We established these to:
Working with partners, we helped lead on a coordinated approach to make people aware about responsible tourism. Building on our experience of previous years, this resulted in the campaign Keep Scotland Unspoiled.
Keep Scotland Unspoiled used social media, local radio and digital marketing. It aimed to educate, inspire and inform people about issues such as:
We used humour to convey our key messaging. We also ensured we set a more positive tone around the need to behave responsibly when visiting outdoor places.
As part of our efforts this year to reach younger audiences, we also worked with some of Scotland’s top travel influencers. They created content for their channels themed around the key topics.
We created a dedicated a free media toolkit with films, images, content, and more. The tourism industry (business and stakeholders) can use it across their own social media activity and marketing.
It contains a wide range of useful content related to responsible tourism, such as:
Agencies and local authorities worked in partnership to address the issues on the ground.
This included long-term strategic planning and permanent infrastructure developments alongside immediate measures. Some of these were temporary infrastructure and the provision of additional rangers.
Specific plans and initiatives on which our partners took the lead included:
This fund supported extra or new seasonal ranger posts and visitor operations staff. These people dealt with visitor management in “hot spot” locations in Scotland during the 2022 and 2023 season.
This initiative ran in 2021 and 2022, helping to meet the growing demand for motorhome and campervan stopping places. It also encouraged people to stay a little longer and provide a boost to many small rural businesses.
Local councils have specific activity including regional visitor management planning and measures.
We also delivered the Rural Tourism Infrastructure Fund with Scottish Government. It addressed the pressures on infrastructure and negative impacts on local communities due to a rise in visitors to these areas.
24 strategic tourism infrastructure development plans were also developed across rural Scotland. These also helped to inform the priorities for the rural tourism infrastructure fund over the last couple of years.
Our partner agencies made visitor experiences as enjoyable and positive as possible with a focus on key hotspots. In 2022, the same approach was adopted in the following locations:
These parts of Scotland faced visitor management challenges. So, they put measures in place to ensure those visiting enjoy their time but leave no trace.
The areas are diverse and include everything from beaches, forestry, lochs and some of Scotland’s highest mountains. Visitors experienced a range of local improvements including:
There is a range of projects being undertaken by partners across the country. They particularly use technology to tackle visitor management challenges and assist visitors. These include:
This app helps visitors and residents to check how busy destinations are. It works using sensor data captured live from eleven of East Lothian Council’s coastal carparks.
This pilot project trials a way of providing all the potential travel options for visitors in one place. It will make it easier to research, plan and book a day trip.
Developing a new platform to take data from sensors, this traveltech startup is working with:
These sensors count footfall along with on-the-ground observations added by countryside rangers. This will train an algorithm, predicting crowded areas and times in future.
This way, it can offer visitors can alternative suggestions for places to go.
These were deployed as part of the Highland Council’s visitor management plans.
The council’s rangers started work in April and the team will build to at least seventeen rangers by June. Together they work through the high season and into early autumn.