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Article published 23/04/2025

Our flagship travel-trade workshop event VisitScotland Connect, held at P&J Live on Wednesday 9 and Thursday 10 April in Aberdeen, saw two packed days of meetings, networking, and dinner, as well as a series of familiarisation trips (pre and post-event) around Scotland.

Travel-trade ready Scottish businesses showcased their products and experiences to tour operators, travel advisors and Destination Management Companies to generate future business, meeting new clients and contracting new product.

VisitScotland Connect is pivotal to our industry’s internationalisation journey and helps Scottish businesses to reach new audiences and new markets. This year we saw an increase in local authority support to enable early pipeline businesses to attend the event through grant funding.

Our Chief Executive, Vicki Miller, opened the event with a welcome – which highlighted the importance of tourism and events to Scotland’s visitor economy, the value of internationalisation and shared the many upcoming events which will welcome visitors from across the world and showcase Scotland to the world. This included the Commonwealth Games 2026, The Open at St Andrews and the Tour de France in 2027.

This year, across the two days

243

Scottish businesses represented

271

tour operators and travel advisors

20 countries

from across the world, all in Aberdeen

over 8,200 meetings

over two days held

2 journalists

from STV, interviewed our Chief Executive for the Evening News

13 fam trips

showcased 20 regions of Scotland

127 buyers

attended the fam trips

210 businesses

were showcased during the familiarisation trips

Feedback from the buyers

Since the event, we've received lots of positive feedback from tour operators and travel advisors about their experiences at VisitScotland Connect 2025. This includes:
 

  • "I'm already working on a fabulous itinerary that will include spending 4 nights in Glasgow and taking day trips via rail. I've got a lot of interest in this one! I'm sure that I when I put it all together and put it out, I'll have no problem selling this one! What an inspiration that fam was! I'm also going to pair it with a coach trip after our time on the rail, and head to Angus to visit some of the places we met at Connect. I'm inspired!"

  • "Thank you so much for a fantastic fam trip - it was genuinely brilliant, and answered a lot of questions I had about what is possible. I have actually already pitched a couple of the places we visited in an itinerary I am putting together for next summer, which is great."

  • "It was a wonderful opportunity to see some of the region’s hotels and attractions at first hand which is so useful when planning future tours and itineraries. Nothing can replace personal experience – it is invaluable when planning tours and programme content and I never underestimate the effort, expense and time that you and all your suppliers put in to making a fam trip like this such a success. It was a real privilege to experience some of the highlights of the North East as your guest."

  • "VisitScotland Connect is the best run tourism conference I go to, and the layout is great for connecting with people - 'Connect - it does what it says on the tin'. I also loved the Scottish Country Dancing at the dinner, and thinks it is music that makes everyone happy and you have two days of euphoria after it."

Buyers experiencing Glasgow as part of a VisitScotland Connect familiarisation trip.VisitScotland Connect 2025 familiarisation trip group visiting University of Glasgow Cloisters. Credit: VisitScotland / Ada Zhou.

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Travel Trade Distribution Day

On Tuesday 8 April we hosted our second Travel Distribution Day. This free event was held for north-east suppliers who are new to working with the travel trade. This event focused on showcasing how to promote  tourism product and business in-front of a global audience.  

This was hosted at the P&J Live, the day before VisitScotland Connect 2025 began. This year, 31 people joined us to learn more about sustainable growth within the travel-trade landscape, working with online tour operators (OTA's) and to hear from external speakers, including; Reanne Verlegh - National Trust for Scotland, Anh Nguyen of CT Consults, Sarah Muir of Abbey Travel, Yvette Hogen of Dolphin Spirit, Jose Gomez of Get Your Guide and Katja Maki-Komsi of  Radical Travel.

Related links

About our visitors

Find out who visits Scotland, what they're interested in, and what they're looking for.

Responsible tourism research

Find research into responsible tourism in Scotland. This includes reports on visitor, community, and industry insights.