Visit Scotland | Alba
Article published 22/05/2024

Spotlight on | sector activity

Collaboration is key to our marketing activity. With so many innovative and exciting visitor experiences and products, we look to our communities and businesses for where we can drive further value from tourism for Scotland.

We work with a range of sector groups to help raise awareness of this wealth of visitor experiences. There’s a particular focus on those that help to:

  • extend a trip
  • increase visitor spend
  • support responsible travel behaviours
  • deliver high visitor and community satisfaction

Outdoor and active tourism

This sector offers considerable growth opportunities aligned to our responsible tourism ambitions. We work with several partners to raise awareness of Scotland’s great outdoors.

Activity highlights

  • Cycling

    We're building on the success of major events like the 2023 UCI Cycling World Championships. For this, we delivered pre, during and post event marketing activity.

    We also ran a joint spring 2024 cycling campaign with Sustrans Scotland, focused on Round The Inner Forth cycling route. This saw 12,000 views of the webpage against a target of 7,800.

  • Galloway & Southern Ayrshire UNESCO Biosphere

    Having been named in National Geographic’s Cool List of Destinations 2024, we partnered with the Galloway & Southern Ayrshire UNESCO Biosphere to create a joint marketing campaign that amplified this accolade and increased awareness of what the Biosphere is and means to visitors, whilst generating interest on their owned channels.

    Read the "cool list of destinations 2024" on nationalgeographic.com.

  • Ramblers Scotland

    We worked with Ramblers Scotland alongside NatureScot, Forestry and Land Scotland, and the Cairngorms National Park Authority, to create a campaign to inspire more responsible visitor behaviours in Scotland’s wild places, particularly across a younger demographic.

    Ramblers worked with a diverse panel of young people to co-create the campaign on everything from scripting to casting and publishing on TikTok, SnapChat, and Instagram.

    The campaign videos were viewed an impressive 2.9 million times online, and provided key learnings on how to best optimise for this target audience.

Food and drink tourism

This is a fundamental element of any trip in Scotland. With Scotland’s rich larder there is plenty to shout about.

We support the Scottish Food Tourism Action Plan’s aim of making Scotland a global foodie destination by 2030 through all our marketing activity. Food and drink content on visitscotland.com had 923,000 page views in 2023. And our social media activity has reached millions.

Activity highlights | social media

177

social media posts

10.6 million

consumers reached

386,000

views of our video content

445,000

reactions to our activity

Working with Scotland Food & Drink, we’ve developed and launched the new food tourism industry guide.

Use our food tourism industry guide to discover how to create impactful experiences that exceed the expectations of visitors and help you make the most of this lucrative market.

Browse our food tourism industry guide.

Agritourism

We've worked closely with Scottish Agritourism partners over the last four years to help raise the profile of Scottish working farms, crofts and estates’ agritourism experiences.

We've shared their field-to-fork food and drink stories. Through our channels, we also helped highlight the important role this sector is playing to:

  • enhance the country’s culinary reputation
  • reduce food miles

52 agritourism businesses now working with travel trade, which is a 40% increase year on year. There are now over 1,000 agritourism business web listings on visitscotland.com.

We supported the development and delivery of the Scottish agritourism strategy. We also produced  the Scottish agritourism growth tracker. This measures the potential of the country’s agritourism industry.

Read our news item on the Scottish agritourism growth tracker.

 

 

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