A tourism destination benchmarking study for Stirling, Scotland

Client:

Scottish Enterprise

The challenge:

Scottish Enterprise, on behalf of Destination Stirling, Stirling Council and VisitScotland commissioned TEAM to benchmark Stirling against similar international destinations. The aim was to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of its tourism assets, its business base and supporting infrastructure and organisations.

Services provided:

TEAM undertook desk research and consulted with stakeholders in Stirling in order to select a set of comparator cities and identify the key factors to be included in the case studies. TEAM’s researchers, fluent in the respective languages, then undertook visits to the chosen cities – Cork, Durham, Trento, Linz, Roskilde and Avignon – to speak to key players in tourism development, gather information and visit relevant tourism sites – as the basis for preparing reports on each city and an overview report and a paper highlighting the implications for Stirling.

Outcome:

The outputs will be used to help inform future strategy development and delivery within Stirling, with the aim of raising the city’s destination competitiveness and of achieving higher levels of visitor spend. The study was particularly important for Stirling Council, as it informed their ambitious development plan to transform Stirling into a world-class centre of enterprise and opportunity.