Tourism 2020: a tourism strategy for the city of Edinburgh

Client:

Edinburgh Tourism Action Group (ETAG)

The challenge:

ETAG recognised that, for Edinburgh to compete successfully with other UK, European and global cities, it must have a clear strategic position for the decade ahead. It also needed to ensure the city’s unique and compelling visitor experience matched the expectations of future global visitor markets.

Services provided:

TEAM was commissioned to prepare a new Edinburgh Tourism Strategy with a clear and ambitious vision for the city up to 2020. This involved:

• a full review of local and national documents to provide the economic, social and cultural context for the strategy
• extensive research, including a review of Edinburgh’s tourism resources and markets, a social media analysis of Edinburgh and its principal competitors and comparators, case studies of relevant activities, and profiles of potential target markets
• an extensive programme of stakeholder engagement, through one-to-one interviews and sectoral workshops, involving about 150 stakeholders
• two main strategy development workshops attended by 50 key stakeholders
• the creation of five Action Planning Groups, whose task was to prepare an Action Plan for each of the main Strategic Priorities

Outcome:

The strategy provided a strategic framework for stakeholders (tourism industry groups, local and national government and agencies of government) to work together and to guide key investment decisions. The strategy was launched by Scotland’s Tourism Minister at ETAG’s Annual Conference, attended by around 200 industry stakeholders.