Tourism in North East England

What Every Tourism Business Needs to Know

Tourism is changing, and has been for the past five to ten years. The tourism and leisure market is growing, but so is the competition. It is the quality businesses, in quality destinations, that are winning the business. Raising quality, right across a destination, is now behind every tourism strategy in the UK, and many in Europe and the rest of the world.

What does quality mean?

Quality businesses are ones which provide products and services that meet and exceed customer expectations. They are well run, give great customer service and market themselves effectively (especially online).

Quality destinations are ones where there are a number of great places to stay, visit, eat and drink at and be entertained in. They are welcoming, professional and the tourism businesses in them work with each other. They also work with the public sector to keep improving the destination and to ensure that potential visitors' impressions of the area are positive.

What can you do?

This isn't just about winning more business, it's also about becoming more successful and more profitable. There are two things you can do. The first is to raise quality in your own business. This means using the research and guidance available, then really looking at the products and services you offer to make sure they meet (and exceed) the needs of today's customers. It also means making sure you run your business well: effective advertising, good staff training, tight finances, local sourcing of suppliers and keeping an eye on your environmental impact. Finally, it means going that bit further - really helping your customers to get the most out of their holiday and leisure time, and to explore your destination. Our Making a Quality Plan section gives step-by-step advice on working through each of these aspects to gauge your current performance and to generate ideas for change and improvement.

The second thing you can do is work with other tourism businesses and tourism organisations in your area to share ideas and information, collaborate on joint projects, create packages and special offers, market together and influence local decision making. You'll get far more by working together than you will by going it alone. See our Networking with Other Businesses page for more advice on this.

Who can help?

Tourism is big business - it's worth £3.5 billion in our region alone - so there is plenty of help and support out there. This Tourism Business Toolkit has been developed to help tourism businesses easily get at the wealth of advice, support, guidance, training and funding in our region. Use the web pages and factsheets to get information about every aspect of running and marketing a tourism business and to find research, training, finance and marketing opportunities. Use the Who's Who in Tourism section to find tourism and non-tourism organisations that can support you, and use the Tourism Message Board and Networking section to share, discuss, network and identify partners.

And if you can't find what you want tell us, and we'll add it.

Next steps:

Read the rest of this section, Tourism in the North East, especially Key Facts and Run a Successful Tourism Business.

Then visit the Making a Quality Plan section in Raising Quality for detailed step-by-step guidance on running a quality business.