Quality in Tourism

In this blog post I’m looking at the 3W’s. Websites, Wallace Monument and Wind farms. The theme – quality in tourism.

I’ve just completed a major piece of work proofreading and copy-editing three websites for a client in the adventure tourism sector. Grammatical and spelling errors on websites have put me off purchasing a product or staying somewhere in the past, so it is good to see business people who recognise the benefit in having their websites checked over for potential business-losing errors. Quality in tourism begins when someone picks up your leaflet or clicks onto your website, not when they walk through your door. Sloppiness on your leaflet or website could ensure they never come close to your door.

A week last Sunday I finally got round to visiting a Scottish tourism attraction that has been high on my list to visit for the last thirty years. I was in the Stirling area after a hill race, and the weather was at its autumnal best, so I popped along to visit the Wallace Monument. Despite the earlier exertion of running up Ben Cleuch, the 246 steps to the top of the monument were a great way of stirring up the lactic acids in my legs and preventing the joy of Monday morning seized-up thighs. As a tourism experience I thoroughly enjoyed the monument, and the October colours made me realise this must be the best month of the year for visiting this kind of attraction, which relies on the surrounding scenery for maximising the quality of its tourism experience.

One aspect of the Wallace Monument tourism experience that I didn’t enjoy was the sight of ever more industrial-sized wind farms in the area. The previous day I had spoken to someone whose house had lost £100,000 in value because of a nearby wind farm, and the owner of a tourism business who was seriously concerned about the potential impact on his business because of a proposed wind farm site close to his business. The government’s attitude to tourism businesses appears to be that it doesn’t matter what we do to the landscape, visitors will always come here anyway. If attracting visitors is that easy, why is it that tourism marketing is so competitive and so important to our nation? Tourists don’t just come to Scotland whatever we do to our landscape (the tourism attraction). International tourists are easily put off and diverted elsewhere. Even for those of us who live here, it is easy to find ourselves avoiding certain areas or saving up for more overseas trips at the expense of weekends away in our own country.

Quality matters in tourism, and at a time when individual businesses are working incredibly hard to improve the quality of their products, I find it sad that our political leaders have a total disregard for the quality of Scotland’s unique and iconic landscapes.