Welsh Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Wales as a global tourist destination, HC 220
Wednesday 20 July 2022
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 20 July 2022.
Members present: Stephen Crabb (Chair); Wayne David; Ruth Jones; Rob Roberts; Dr Jamie Wallis.
Questions 143 - 187
Witnesses
I: Anthony Pickles, Former Head of Tourism Affairs, VisitBritain; Professor Annette Pritchard, Professor of Tourism Management at Leeds Beckett University; and Professor Dorothy A. Yen, Professor in Marketing, Brunel Business School at Brunel University London.
Witnesses: Anthony Pickles, Professor Annette Pritchard and Professor Dorothy A. Yen.
Q143 Chair: Good morning and welcome to this session of the Welsh Affairs Committee where we are continuing our inquiry into Wales as a global tourist destination. I am delighted that we are joined this morning by three expert witnesses. We are joined in Committee room 6 by Anthony Pickles, who is the former head of tourism affairs for VisitBritain. We are joined virtually by Professor Annette Pritchard, professor of tourism management at Leeds Beckett University and Professor Dorothy Yen, professor in marketing at Brunel Business School, Brunel University. Good morning to you all.
I will start the session by asking each of you to give us a sense of how you think Wales is doing in attracting international visitors. Is the assumption of some people that Wales is underperforming in attracting international visitors a fair assumption?
Anthony Pickles: The answer in short is yes, Wales is massively underperforming and it has been for some time. If you look before the pandemic—we will take the pandemic secondly—Wales attracted about 1 million international visitors. They had about five core international markets that they were derived from, Ireland being by far the biggest.
If you take that in the scope of the UK-wide figure, where 40 million visitors came to the UK, you can see that one-fortieth is not a good performance. If you compare that with Scotland, it was in the region of about 3.5 million. The answer is fundamentally that Wales needs to do a lot better.
Professor Pritchard: Yes, I agree with that. Wales is underperforming quite significantly. There are a whole host of reasons for that, which I am sure we will explore today. It is definitely Britain’s best kept secret. The disappointing thing for me is that in 2014 I gave evidence to a previous inquiry that was looking at a very similar subject and, to be honest, I feel that nothing much has moved on in the past 15 years. It has been a position of consistent underperformance.
Q144 Chair: Professor Pritchard, is the lack of progress you have just mentioned specifically in relation to Wales, or is that a comment about Britain’s tourism?
Professor Pritchard: It is much wider than just Wales and hopefully we will go on to explore this in a little bit more detail. If you look at the picture for international visitors to Wales, what we see is from 2006 that was the high point for Wales. If we look beyond that, in 2008 London used to have 46% of the international visitor cake. Since then, it has now had 50% and 50-plus per cent. That has been sustained over a period of 15 years. What we have seen is that London’s share has increased at the expense of the other visits. Wales had 3.6%. Now it hovers around the 2% mark. It does not go above 2%. Last year London was 53% of the international visitor cake and 57% of the spend. What we have seen is a concentration in London and a failure to distribute tourists to the regions and nations, which, of course, is a key aim of VisitBritain.
It has not just been felt by Wales; it has been felt by the regions of England and it has also been experienced by Scotland.
Professor Yen: I very much share the same sentiment here. I do think that Wales could be better promoted. If you look at the 2019 figures, the international tourists spent a lot more in Wales compared with local tourists. On average, international tourists spent about £503, while the local tourists spent £34.33 in each average visit.
I think the reason why there is a lack of awareness and lack of promotion of Wales may be down to its lack of a clear unique selling point. International tourists would struggle to identify the unique destination offerings that are exclusive to Wales.
One thing we should also look into further today is the fact that we do draw a lot of international tourists to London, so could we get them from London to Wales on a day visit or a short three-day trip so that we are bringing more international tourists to Wales?
Q145 Chair: Professor Pritchard, I would like to come back to your comments about London getting a larger share of the tourism cake. Is that part of a general trend across different countries towards city breaks and city visits? By extension, is Wales suffering because it lacks a really strong city offering for the short-term city break market?
Professor Pritchard: It is probably largely because London is so tied into the VisitBritain brand and when visitors abroad think of Britain initially they think of London. Then, if they are keen Anglophiles, they may well come back for a second or third trip, and it is perhaps on that third trip or the fourth trip that they think about exploring Wales because they have very little perception of what Wales is.
I do not think it reflects a general trend towards city breaks, although I think it is easy within the GB offer to package various city offerings. You would see London and then the next stage circuit may be to Stratford, York, Edinburgh, so they are all key city milestones that act as magnets and, yes, I do not think Cardiff has the same pull as those other cities.
The problem is bigger than that. It isn't a Cardiff problem. It is basically the fact that Wales is very unknown and very unpackaged. That is another dimension that I am sure we will talk about. The lack of package is so important in terms of experiential products these days.
Q146 Chair: Thank you very much. Mr Pickles, given the work you did on the tourism sector deal, what is your assessment of the tourism recovery plan and whether that is going to deliver an increase in international visitors to Wales?
Anthony Pickles: It is a very interesting question. Everything that has been said so far is absolutely true. We do have a real issue with how we package visits in this country and our transport connectivity, particularly what is known in tourism as “the final mile”. When the tourism sector deal came about, it was at the time when there was an industrial strategy. I am not sure if that still exists. It is certainly above the door of the Business Department, but the aim then was that Britain wanted to underpin the sectors of growth for the future. It was quite easy for automotives to do it. You needed five manufacturers in a room. Collectively, they roughly knew what the policy agenda was, how they could partner and so on.
For tourism, it was a lot more difficult. You have 200,000 SMEs across the whole of the UK that are involved in tourism and so, collectively, to get them to come together with one voice, one ask that would be compelling to the Government was a challenge. What we did was we flipped it on its head. The scale of it was what we saw as our great strength because, of course, the aim of the industrial strategy was to grow productivity in the UK. For tourism, productivity means seasonality. It means getting people beyond London, getting them across using the assets that are available across the country, particularly in places like Wales.
When that sector deal finally came off, I think there was a real buzz in the industry that the Government were taking it seriously. It actually had a voice at the table and it could progress into the future. Then, obviously, the pandemic struck and the tourism recovery fund was borne out of the sector deal.
What the tourism recovery fund aims to do is to look at how you are going to rebuild confidence. This year we are probably only going to get to about 60% of where we were pre-pandemic, which is not where we want to be.
Chair: With international visitors?
Anthony Pickles: Yes, with international visitors. There have obviously been some benefits from the pandemic, through domestic tourism, people discovering their own country and the like. However, focusing on international visitors, there is a lot more understanding to be done.
One of the things that was in the sector deal, which is also in the recovery plan, is to drill down on data. A lot of the tourism data that is available to us to look at and research is looking in the past; it is not looking in the current and in the future, so that does not enable us to work out where the sticking points are—where people come unstuck trying to get out of London, for example, or where people are potentially searching through their social media. Everybody wants that unique experience and the like.
Tourism bodies like VisitBritain just do not have that data to hand. They need to work in partnership with the private sector, with the telephone companies, with the travel operators and create a data hub within the sector deal that is in the recovery plan. For me, I have always thought that is the real competitive edge globally that Britain could have. It would be a huge benefit to Wales.
Chair: That is very helpful. Thank you very much to all three of you. Rob Roberts.
Q147 Rob Roberts: Good morning, everybody. Professor Pritchard, you have been critical in the past of VisitBritain’s emphasis on just getting as many tourists into the UK as possible rather than delivering for different regions and nations on an individual basis. What changes would you recommend and would you like to have seen for there to be more of a focus on the different nations?
Professor Pritchard: That needs to be tied into packages. Funding packages with targets around ensuring visitor spend, safeguarding and enhancing tourism visitor jobs. VisitBritain, Visit Wales and VisitScotland do work together. They have signed memoranda of understanding where they work in partnership, they share image banks, they work on PR and familiarisation visits together, but it is only when you come down to the hard stuff, the nitty-gritty, where you put a package together and say, “Right, we are going to put this kind of funding together and it is going to be your responsibility to collectively deliver it”.
There was one example of this, which was done in 2017, and it was a £2 million Treasury-funded package to protect and enhance tourism towards Loch Ness, Inverness and Glencoe, and both organisations were tied into joint targets to generate tourism spend and protect tourism jobs. For me, for somewhere like Wales, that is definitely the way to go.
You can have all sorts of co-operation and image sharing, but until you start to change the product, the experiential packages, the delivery, the space for a place in a brand, it is not going to change. We have been doing it the old way up until now and things have not changed in effectively a generation. That is what I would recommend.
Q148 Rob Roberts: Thank you for that answer. As a general question then for everybody following on from that—we will start with Professor Pritchard as you are on a roll and we can keep this thought process going—what concerns do you have generally about the relationship between VisitBritain and Visit Wales? Is that relationship having an impact on the success of marketing Wales overseas?
Professor Pritchard: It is obviously very difficult to speak as an outsider, because you are not in either of the organisations. I previously did work for the Wales Tourist Board, which probably gives you a clue as to how old I am. There is always a difficulty in working with an organisation that is very closely aligned with another Visit. Mr Pickles has referred to that. VisitBritain and VisitEngland are quite heavily intertwined and I think that will always produce a degree of suspicion on the part of other Visits because they prepare joint reports, they share offices, their priorities are similar. It does raise an interesting question.
It is VisitEngland’s job to keep visitors within the borders of England. It is VisitBritain’s job to disseminate those tourists around the whole of GB. There must be some sort of clash somewhere along the line. You wonder what would happen in those kinds of circumstances, but that is probably a bit too Machiavellian. I don’t even think it is that. You work closely with people, you work together, you share the same goals, you share the same top-line interest, so you have much more of a collegiate approach and then you may be engaged with Visit Wales and VisitScotland on a much less regular basis. There is bound to be some dissynergy—a made up word, for want of a better word—problem arising from that.
There is probably also some tension in terms of whose responsibility it is. Both Visit Wales and VisitScotland have overseas marketing powers. They work in partnership with VisitBritain. Who drives the partnership? Who drives the programmes and the campaigns? How do these work? How does Visit Wales ensure it gets a fair share of the campaign, like the VisitBritain GREAT campaign? I am sure we will come on to talk about that as well, so there are lots of tensions in any organisational working.
Q149 Rob Roberts: If “dyssynergy” isn’t a word, it should be. The expert on telling us whether there is a dissynergy or not will be Mr Pickles. How do they work together, VisitBritain and Visit Wales?
Anthony Pickles: Not very well. I can say that as a former employee. It is important to understand the structure here. In 1969 the tourist boards were created in this country, as we know them today. Devolution comes along 30 years on from that and Visit Wales, VisitScotland come into their own with a lot of those powers—not all of them but a lot of powers—that were traditionally held, transferred formally to be held within those bodies.
Visit Wales then changes in 2005 to become an in-house department, so it is not independent. VisitBritain is still an independent, arm’s length body of the state. DCMS will set it management targets. It will set it organisational goals, but it has an independent board that will set the independence formally in terms of the structure and how it wants to operate. From that, you then have the operation in terms of how it links up with the nation. So, as Professor Pritchard has already referenced, there will be joint boards. Fundamentally, you come down to the fact that tourism is very political. How you brand your nation is about as political as you can get. It is no surprise that you run into tension.
The issue I always found—and I particularly found this with putting together the sector deal, which was aimed at being a UK-wide sector deal and we did get it to that stage at the end—was effectively there was a conscious effort on behalf of the Ministers in the devolved Governments to see it as an opportunity for more funding. It was, “We don’t want your policy but we will take the money. Thank you very much”. That was an issue.
Looking at the other side, they will look at VisitBritain and they will say, “Hang on, they share a building with VisitEngland”—as Professor Pritchard has already alluded to—“they are not on our side”. What this gets to is: for Wales to improve its international offer you need to have a joint strategy. It is absolutely clear. Tourism is devolved, nobody is questioning that, but all of the peripheral issues that sit around it—like visas, the infrastructure through airports, the experience at the border, transport across the country—are not devolved. All of these things have to fit, hand in glove, in order for a clear and coherent strategy to be developed. That just comes at every stage into a wall, which is basically Ministers fundamentally not agreeing.
Q150 Rob Roberts: Just for clarity, Visit Wales was separate and then it was brought into the Welsh Government as a managed thing?
Anthony Pickles: VisitScotland is independent. VisitEngland and VisitBritain are independent, arm’s length bodies of Government. Visit Wales is a Government Department. It has a Minister that it answers to, a Deputy Minister within the Government, so it does not have high priority within the Welsh Government. I looked at the Deputy Minister’s portfolio yesterday. Tourism is listed 33 out of the 46 areas of responsibility that she manages. Eleven per cent. of the economy—really?
Q151 Rob Roberts: That bringing in of Visit Wales into the Government as a Department, would you say that was directly responsible for some of the dissynergy that we have experienced?
Anthony Pickles: You have civil servants operating on behalf of their Minister, so if the Minister sets the direction the civil servants carry it out on their behalf. That does not happen when you are arm’s length. That does not happen when you are independent.
Q152 Rob Roberts: That makes sense. Thank you very much. Professor Yen, do you have anything to add to what we have heard so far about the relationship between the two?
Professor Yen: I do, because I had a good scan of those websites for international tourists and I thought, “Visit Wales promotes Wales really well”. It is the logo, the places it recommends and then when you click into each page it gives you a content-rich description of each spot. In a way, it is intriguing and I wanted to read more of it.
When I went back to VisitBritain, they have four different pages. You have England, Scotland, Wales. I don’t think there is a Northern Ireland there. When you click on to it, you see there is a video promoting England. There is a video promoting Scotland and there is no video promoting Wales. That was odd.
When I went on to the VisitBritain social media account and Instagram, nothing much is posted there. There is a French account promoting Great Britain to the French audience, where there are 21 subheadings and Wales is one of them. It is one out of 21, which means that the significance of Wales could be better highlighted there. There is also an Arabic account, which promotes Great Britain to the Middle Eastern market and tourists. Again, there were three subheadings: London, Manchester and Edinburgh. There was no reference to Wales whatsoever.
From my perspective, comparing these two tourism boards, I would say Visit Wales did a much better job and the synergy or maybe the leadership needs to come more from Visit Wales, and VisitBritain needs to work better with Visit Wales to create that synergy. Lot of content that Visit Wales created could be shared with VisitBritain anyway.
Q153 Rob Roberts: A very good point. Of course, we don’t know at this point whether VisitBritain have asked for that content and not received it, so we will have to explore that perhaps in another session.
Professor Pritchard, you had your hand raised after Mr Pickles’s comment, did you want to weigh in with something else?
Professor Pritchard: Yes, one point. I totally agree with Professor Dorothy. She is totally accurate. I think it would be a mistake to blame or apportion this picture change when devolution happened because there were devolved overseas marketing powers. Scotland had them in 1984 and I think Wales had them in 1994. The devolution of power in tourism terms has happened before the overall devolution of government.
I do think the point about bringing Visit Wales into the Welsh Government is worth exploring because I think that that has changed how it operates. It is not an arm’s length body anymore. It is now integral to Government and it responds to Government aims and priorities. It has lost its lobbying power, at least publicly. Those are issues that are worthy of exploration.
I do also feel that this is an institutional problem—a metropolitan view, perhaps, of what happens elsewhere. I think that is also an issue. It is broader than VisitBritain and it regularly gets featured in newspapers and everything. There are a lot of things that determine how people and organisations see other places within the UK. That is probably the point I would like to make there.
Q154 Rob Roberts: This is final question of my section. Mr Pickles, there was a big fanfare about the GREAT campaign around Britain. What are some of the reasons you think the GREAT campaign may have underdelivered for Wales?
Anthony Pickles: It is important to remember where the GREAT campaign came from. The GREAT campaign was formed out of the preparation for the Olympic games in 2012. Its aim effectively was to be an inward investment tool on behalf of the UK Government. For those who wanted to come here to study, to invest and obviously to travel, that is what the purpose of the campaign was for. It is basically targeted at international audiences. It is pretty much invisible to us, or at least it should be. We should not be seeing its content.
If you look at the success it has had over 10 years, the return on investment is around 20 to one. Therefore, for every pound spent in the GREAT campaign, £20 is invested back into the economy. That is a good thing, obviously. The issue the GREAT campaign has is that it has become an ever-increasingly centralised campaign body. VisitBritain gets about £20 million of the £60 million that is allocated for GREAT. Of that £20 million the purpose is basically to do international marketing. All the things that have been referenced by the two professors about the work that VisitBritain does overseas through its social media channels, all of that is funded through the GREAT campaign. That is the purpose of it. That is the funding settlement that DCMS has come across.
The issue for Wales specifically within GREAT is that personally I always felt that there was a resistance to it in Wales, because it has a Union Jack on it, and there was a resistance because it was effectively decided in terms of its content through a marketing board that sat here. Visit Wales did have reference to it, as did Visit Scotland and the devolved Governments, but it was not collaborative enough. If you look at where it sits today, it is the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster who administers the fund, whereas previously, when David Cameron was Prime Minister, it sat within No. 10 Downing Street. It was effectively the marketing of this country.
It is not perfect. It certainly does not represent Wales well enough. I always felt that when I was there. I always felt there was a missed opportunity, particularly not using the language, having Cymraeg used more often internationally to try to do what New Zealand did with Māori. There was an opportunity to draw an entry but we would be kidding ourselves if we believe that most people book their trips and their travel based on what national marketing looks like. It might push people over the line in terms of investment, but you are not booking your next trip on what the marketing poster says in Westminster tube station.
Q155 Rob Roberts: Professor Yen, what was your opinion of the GREAT campaign and how it related to Wales specifically?
Professor Yen: I very much share the same sentiments. I do not think the GREAT campaign has promoted Wales enough. Most Welsh towns and cities are not promoted in great depth. If you look at its website, the text description is often relatively short when they describe those places. It often ended up with the VisitBritain shop as the second-layer banner on the webpage. The saddest thing is that no relevant Welsh products are being promoted there. In a way, you are browsing a webpage about somewhere in Wales and then it is linked up with all of this marketing promotion. None of those marketing promotions is specific to Wales, which I thought was very odd and somebody should have looked into that.
As I mentioned earlier, there was no video used to promote Wales. On the TV commercial, it is very general about bringing people to Great Britain, rather than disseminating people in terms of where else they need to go once they are in Great Britain. I think there is a missing link there.
Just to go back to the detail, if you look at the VisitBritain webpage under film and TV, the BBC series of “Merlin” is not even mentioned there. That is losing a big opportunity to better promote Wales through film marketing and film tourism. Under the page on arts and culture, I think a section on Welsh legends should be added there as well. I think there are several missing opportunities through my evaluation.
Q156 Rob Roberts: Thank you. It is always good to get a marketing expert’s view. It is very enlightening. Professor Pritchard, do you have anything to add about the GREAT campaign in Wales?
Professor Pritchard: Yes, I agree totally with the comments. There is not much scope for Wales in a campaign that is really about brand Britain. Because Wales is distinctive—that is what its offer is. It is different. It offers you a different language, a different culture, a different set of myths and legends, which tourists would love to engage with. Therefore, no, I don’t think the GREAT campaign has worked for Wales. That is a problem.
On the VisitBritain shop—the digital platform, which visitors buy their passes from—there is virtually no reference to Wales in that shop. When you compare it with Scotland, Scotland has its own hot button for Scotland tours. You can buy 22 to 26 Scotland tours. You can buy four from Wales if you search quite hard. There are 10 tours to Stonehenge. There are 60-odd tours to London. There are 25 London river cruises. There really is a paucity and Wales looks non-existent in that digital shop platform.
Overseas visitors want to go somewhere where they think there is a lot to do. They want to go somewhere where they can buy rich experiential packages. If I looked at that site as an international visitor I would think, “Wales, oh, there doesn’t seem to be anything to do there but there is a lot to do in Scotland and there is a lot I can show my friends and gain a lot of social capital from going on a whisky and waterfalls tour”. The paucity of information is such that if you look on “history and heritage”, there is absolutely no entry for Wales. That is the raison d’être for Wales’s international brand, but there is nothing.
There is no Cadw explorer pass but there are castle passes to Scottish castles. The Cadw explorer pass does exist but it is not there—you cannot buy it. The museum offering is similar. St Fagans has had a significant amount of investment. It won UK museum of the year in 2019 and it has been the Which? museum of the year for 2020 and 2021. They are awaiting what will happen in 2022. There is absolutely no reference to that anywhere on VisitBritain, so there is a real paucity of information about Wales.
That leads to the conclusion, “Where is Wales? What is it? What can you do there? Is it worth going?” Transport is another matter again. There is a big issue, but through greater emphasis on the country, through experiential packages, we can start to chip away at that, but it needs those connections. VisitBritain needs to work closely with Visit Wales to produce that content, to have it there for visitors and to highlight it in marketing.
Q157 Rob Roberts: Thank you very much. I ask for a brief indulgence from the Chair. I noticed out of the corner of my eye Mr Pickles shaking his head a little bit at some of the things that I heard.
Anthony Pickles: Let’s not mistake ourselves here. The VisitBritain shop is not the be-all and end-all of our retail offer. I think it makes about 2 million quid a year. In the scale of the £120 billion that is spent in this country with international visitors it is not a major issue. Within that, there is product that applies to Wales. The BritRail pass is one of the key things. This is the railway pass that is on offer to international visitors where they can basically navigate British railways. It is not available to British citizens. It is only available to international visitors. That effectively is the key reason why there is an e-commerce offer from VisitBritain these days anyway.
More importantly, I want to comment on the nation brand issue. If you look at the soft power index for the UK, Britain comes out either first or second pretty much every single year, including during our recent political travails. The offer there is incredibly compelling. The issue now is not that we see Wales pitched against the offer, because it is not going to be able to compete with it; it is that it needs to be complementary. We need the Welsh offer to fit into this huge international success. If we take the view that the customer is always right, which is normally what you do in any sort of business sense, if people are coming because they like the idea of what Britain is, we must do what it takes to get them around Britain and get them out of zone 1 in London, which is where Professor Pritchard referenced that 54% of people stay. It is not a compelling offer if that is all that people see. They need to get out and see the rest of the country.
Rob Roberts: I did see Professor Pritchard with her hand up. I am sure we will keep exploring these with some of my colleagues in a minute but I will hand over to the Chair.
Chair: Thank you. Wayne would like to come in on a supplementary on an earlier question.
Q158 Wayne David: I have a number of questions that follow on from what has been said, but to begin with, I am old enough to remember the Welsh Development Agency, the WDA. It was extremely effective for a time in promoting Wales as a distinct entity within the United Kingdom but when that was brought in-house there was—I was going to say an ending, but there was certainly a diminution of that branding. Can a parallel be struck here? You were talking about VisitBritain, which is separate from Government, and Visit Wales is part of a Government. Are there any organisational structural lessons that can be taken a bit further? I note that Professor Pickles has said in an article in the Institute of Welsh Affairs magazine that there isn’t operational independence and, therefore, there is no pushback on ministerial instruction. You have worked inside the Senedd. Are you aware of any instances where perhaps civil servants have had an idea, a direction of travel that you thought was good, but Ministers said, “No, we want a different approach”?
Anthony Pickles: I never worked in Visit Wales, so I cannot comment on that. It would be unfair of me to guess if the officials that worked there ever pushed back on their Ministers, because there are a lot of good people who work there.
There are a lot of people in Wales who think that the WDA was a great thing and want to bring it back. I cannot comment on that, because it had a wider remit than just the visitor economy. When you have independence, like VisitScotland, like VisitBritain, you get an independent board where it brings together the very best in the industry to help advise you on what is going on in live time across business. We know—and you have heard from lots of them in this inquiry—that there are some fantastic Welsh business leaders in this sector, but their voices are not heard in an instructive way, particularly.
We have Ian Edwards, who you have heard from, who sits on the VisitBritain board, so he is Wales’s voice on there. That is excellent and it should be him. On Visit Wales he might sit on panels, but unless he has meetings independently with the Minister, it is going to be much harder to drive policy change, because the policy levers are going to sit very firmly with Government Ministers. It just does not fit right with what tourism is about. It does not fit with the fact that you have a sector that is made up of many SMEs who want to feel that they have representation from their own. I am not sure that Ministers who change fairly frequently is the answer to that.
Q159 Wayne David: Basically, what you are saying is that Visit Wales should follow the model of VisitBritain and become an arm’s length organisation?
Anthony Pickles: I think if it were arm’s length, what you would see is that it would make braver policy calls, and also the marketing would feel possibly more authentic. The marketing is very good, but whether it answers the question that needs to be asked, whether the type of product that is available in Wales is right, I think the answer must be no, given the data that have already been referenced by me and the two professors.
We will probably come on to the type of product that is needed to break through this barrier of why international visitors just do not make their way through Wales, but there is a panoply of issues that if it was an independent body would be fixed.
Q160 Wayne David: On that, are you suggesting that part of the problem is not simply the structural relationship between VisitBritain and Visit Wales but the inappropriate ideas and suggestions that are coming forward from Wales at the moment?
Anthony Pickles: It is not that anything is inappropriate; it is just that there is a clash in strategies. Quite often, whether it is on marketing or product development, particularly on policy, you need Ministers working at a level where they can work collaboratively. You also need the bodies that are responsible for driving international tourism to be able to work together in a constructive way and that is not forced by politics, or that does not come into this obstacle course that I regularly found gets in the way of doing the right thing.
Q161 Ruth Jones: Thank you to the three of you for your time this morning. It is interesting to hear you.
Let’s talk about product. What we are hearing from all three of you is that Wales would be better served by a distinct brand, rather than being embedded in the UK. It is getting lost. That is what I seem to hear, but I do not want to put words in your mouth. Am I getting the right impression from the three of you? If so, what are the key characteristics of Wales that you would want to highlight in the product? I will start with Professor Pritchard.
Professor Pritchard: There is a lot of scope to lever the GB brand to assist in developing Welsh tourism. Wales definitely needs its own very distinct brand identity in much the same way that Scotland manages to do both those functions very well. From what Mr Pickles was saying about Britain being a very well-recognised brand, it is always top of the international visitor league, so what we need to do is to make that brand work effectively for Wales.
Wales needs to have a very distinctive brand and it needs to be able to bridge that gap between getting the visitors into London and then bringing them into Wales. That is clearly the main focus.
There is a brand there, but what it needs is some more enhancement and bravery to grasp what it is that international tourists want from their visit to Wales. I think that is what Professor Dorothy refers to in terms of the myths, the legends, the dragon, the druids, all of that history and heritage that Wales has. That is what we need to leverage.
I wonder if the problem now is that, because Visit Wales is part of the Welsh Government, what you are seeing is how receptive would the Welsh Government be to a brand that is focused on wizards, Arthur, magic, dragons, history and heritage? How does that fit with their view of contemporary Wales? There has always been a debate in any country branding its tourism. Are you going for a tourism brand, or is your tourism brand going to work for you economically as well? There is often a tension between the two because what tourists want, economic developers do not want. If you were in the WDA, if it still existed, and you saw that Visit Wales was branding Wales in terms of history, heritage, myth, legend, they would be saying, “Well, how does that relate to contemporary Wales?” There is that tension and I do worry that tourism’s voice has been lost within Welsh Government.
Up until quite recently there was a board for Visit Wales that sat within Welsh Government structures and reported directly to the Minister. Now, as Mr Pickles has referred to, that board has gone and you have a general economic board which has representation on it, but it is pan-Wales and tourism has quite clearly slid down the pecking order in that respect, and for an industry that is so important to Wales that is not a good move for the sector.
In terms of tourism, I agree that Wales needs to be brave and grasp its myth, its heritage, its legends, and that offers a very distinctive platform. In much the same way, when you think of Scotland you think of tartan and you think of whisky, and even though individuals might get a bit annoyed about that and say it is very stereotypical, that is what tourists like. When you go abroad somewhere, you do not go to experience an alternative destination—or you might if you have been there a lot—but if you are going somewhere, you are going to go to see the major sights and embrace the major attractions.
That is what visitors want. They want history, they want heritage, and we can see that from surveys—the overseas visitor survey—that tourists are recommending trails that Visit Wales could adapt. Visitors recommended a druids’ trail, a dragon trail, an Arthurian trail. All these things are there and can all be packaged and developed, but right now there is a package and experience gap. The product is good. Wales’s product has increased dramatically. We have a very great adventure product. There are lots of people doing a very good job, but what is missing is the linkage between the product, the experience and individual operators.
To develop a trail, you need to have people in different parts of Wales who will be part of that trail, who will deliver the brand promise of that trail, because that is the next important thing. You cannot just have a brand promise. You must deliver that promise on the ground, so if Wales is the land of dragons and the land of Merlin and mythology, you need to ensure that there is reference to that on the ground, because otherwise people will be disappointed. There are points where that is covered. Cadw is a great offering.
Q162 Ruth Jones: That is helpful. I will go to Professor Yen. You have advocated marketing Wales as the land of dragons and legend, as Professor Pritchard has said. Do you see anything else that you need to market as part of the product, or how would you strengthen this connection? We have had some ideas from Professor Pritchard, but what do you think?
Professor Yen: I would like to start with the reason why I advocate the land of dragons and legends for Wales. First, when we have international tourists coming to Great Britain, we need to have a distinct brand identity for Wales so that it can differentiate itself against England and Scotland and then we get those international tourists wanting to go to Wales as well. In marketing terms Great Britain is like a house of brands, a bit like Unilever where you have brands such as Dove, Knorr, Ben and Jerry’s and all that sitting under the Unilever brand. For Great Britain, Wales is part of that brand, but it needs to have its distinctive brand identity. Hence it goes back to the reference to dragons and legends.
I also agree with what Professor Pritchard was saying. Tourism is an experiential product. It needs to be understood, shared and delivered together with the residents. Hence it is important that the Welsh people also agree and understand why we are suggesting to them that we should brand Wales as the land of dragons and legends. It is not because Wales is not contemporary. It is purely because this is in marketing terms the easiest way to attract international tourists to come to Wales, to experience something that is exclusive to Wales and cannot be experienced at home.
The Welsh dragon is something quite special. In the world there are only two countries that have dragons on their flag—Bhutan and Wales—but the Bhutan dragon is a very different type of dragon. It is the oriental type of dragon and the Welsh dragon is a dragon that is associated with fire and a different type of legend. For a lot of international tourists coming to Wales and experiencing the land of dragons, it is something they cannot experience at home. Hence that makes Wales a very interesting, intriguing and attractive international tourist destination spot. That is why we are saying to market Wales’s tourism focusing on that.
While we have international tourism in Wales, of course we are offering more than just a dragon and the legends. They get to experience the hospitality sector, the food and the beautiful coastline and the scenic landscape. All of that is part of it. It is just from marketing terms you are trying to find the more attractive way of luring them in and then we sell the entire tourism offering.
Q163 Ruth Jones: Mr Pickles, we have heard about various aspects, and we had one witness in one of our evidence sessions who said, “We want to make sure that Wales is more than just rain and sheep.” Is there anything else that you would like to add about the product?
Anthony Pickles: The product is where we should be focusing our attention. Marketing is attached to that, but we are looking at the moment at how tourism recovers from the pandemic. We know if you look at all the trends of where there has been a deep global shock that tourism is always the slowest industry to recover. After 9/11 it was about five years until international tourism was back at the same level. It is the same with things like foot and mouth, which had a huge impact in Wales. It does start at this agenda item of where tourism sits. Is it important enough within the structure in which it currently finds itself, in the Welsh Government?
If you look at the conversations that are taking place, it is not about recovery and about product. It is about implementing a tourism tax, or not at all. There is not really very much that is talked about and we know that that tourism tax discussion, regardless of whether it is a good or a bad thing, is a heated debate. It is not where businesses want to focus, which is getting more visitors.
It has to be product and when you look across the world and you look at who is doing this well, one of the examples that I think Wales should emulate is what the Germans have done. If you look at what happened in June of this year, there was a €9 rail pass for the whole month. You buy one pass for €9, obviously massively subsidised, for that whole month and people flocked. They went to all sorts of places in Germany that they had never dreamt of, because they wanted a bargain and they got it. They were intrigued about Germany and they had never thought about it before.
Wales is not Germany, but we know that the challenges are similar in terms of “the final mile” that I talked about earlier, so it should be done through the bus companies and the rail companies in conjunction and, frankly, we know that these journeys are absolutely spectacular in their own right. You go on the Pwllheli line or if you go across Morfa Mawddach or to Pembrokeshire, there are some fantastic things to see. The journey should be part of the product offer, frankly. I think with a bit of imagination it would not take too much.
It is a priority, so this would cost money but if you get people there, they are going to talk about it. They are going to get more people that want to come and see this sort of thing. I just think it is such an obvious thing to do, and frankly, even if it does not work after a month, at least you have tried it. To me it feels like something that I wish would be explored.
Q164 Wayne David: In terms of marketing, what strategy ought there to be for targeting particular groups of individuals? I will refer to a local example of my own area, Caerphilly, which has the second largest castle in Britain and for most tourists who come to Britain it is hardly heard of, and everybody who goes there says it is absolutely incredible.
There is a local debate taking place, where the local authority wants to build a hotel that will overlook the castle. Local people are concerned because it is being talked about as a four or five-star hotel, but the local authority are absolutely crystal clear in their minds that they need to attract people who have spending power, who will help to not just visit the castle but regenerate the town by using local shops and so on, but the local people are wary about that and think that the character of the community will be fractured in some way. What is your view about the kind of people and the targeting that needs to take place so that we get the maximum benefit from tourism?
Anthony Pickles: There are two things. The first is the fact that tourism always must take into account the people who live there permanently and ensure that they get the same benefit from having people come in. You would say economically that that is clearly jobs and investment and the image. People feel proud that people want to come into their area and see what they have to offer. You can see it whenever you go to Caerphilly Castle. You think, “This is probably one of the greatest in Europe”, frankly, because it is. It is a remarkable place and yet people do not think to go there. You do need that product to get them there, and a hotel is a clear example.
You do not want people coming as day trippers. You do not want people like me who would come up from Cardiff and not spend a penny in Caerphilly. You want people who are going to go there and stay in that wonderful four or five-star hotel or go to the restaurants that are linked to the main attraction.
The second point that is critical here, in terms of how we get the marketing right, is something that Visit Wales and VisitBritain do well. The research and information sharing are second to none. It is spot on in terms of the customer profile, in terms of the source markets, trends when it comes to what capacity you have on airlines bringing people in and so on. All this stuff is good and strong, but it needs to be used and used to inform the marketing. Now, it does not feel as if it does as much as it should do.
We know that the proximity argument for Wales is always going to be its strongest card. Ireland is the biggest source market at the moment, and then it is followed, after the US, by Germany, France and the Netherlands, so those types of visitors are the ones that are going to come more frequently; they might come every year. Those are the ones where you should be targeting your marketing.
The emphasis from those that make the decisions is that they want to go for the big flashy destinations—they want your marketing in Times Square, they want it in Shanghai or wherever—but those people are not going to come very regularly. There is a practicality to where your marketing is, and in Wales’s case—as in most of Britain—it needs to be localised, and by that I mean predominantly European.
Q165 Wayne David: Following on from that, is it your understanding that that kind of thinking is present to a greater extent in VisitBritain than Visit Wales?
Anthony Pickles: VisitBritain has a statutory remit through the legislation that underpins it to market Britain overseas. The way that it does that is through collaboration with the nations and regions of Great Britain, so I used to do things with Northern Ireland, but that is a separate issue through the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. The way that it is done could be improved.
It goes to the point that Professor Pritchard was talking about earlier, about how these conversations take place, how the marketing teams meet up, how they collaborate. If you think about where the ultimate instruction comes from, it is from the leadership of both of those organisations and quite often they are at loggerheads. While the research might be good, while the people who work in the marketing and the PR might be fantastic professionals, ultimately, if the sign-off decisions are political, you are going to run into problems.
Q166 Wayne David: To make a comment that is slightly tangential, in my experience, frequently you have a situation with British embassies abroad and they have a significant Welsh input in one way or another. It works very well, the idea of projecting Britain as a diverse collection of nations. It seems strange that at that level that seems to work quite well, but it does not work in terms of tourism.
Anthony Pickles: I always thought that you have some fantastic Welsh ambassadors representing the UK, particularly in France where you have Menna Rawlings, a Brecon woman doing a phenomenal job. She should be there as Wales’s ambassador in some ways as well.
Q167 Chair: Thank you, Wayne. I agree with your point about Menna Rawlings, one of our outstanding ambassadors and she does do a very good job promoting Wales alongside the UK in Paris.
Professor Yen, you have previously stressed the importance of buy-in from multiple stakeholders to the Welsh brand. How would you ensure that these stakeholders feel a sense of ownership over the Welsh brand?
Professor Yen: This is the most important question to ask and to answer, and it is the hardest one. I understand that not all Welsh people welcome having more tourists coming to Wales for the fear that it may destroy the peace and quiet as well as the tranquillity that they would like Wales to keep. Hence, I do believe communication is key. The Government tourism board should try to work with local residents to persuade them of the benefits in terms of why we should have more international tourists.
One clear reason is the economic benefits, that international tourists do spend a lot more on each average visit compared with the average £33 per visit from a local tourist from other parts of the UK. This is a huge difference and needs to be clearly communicated to Welsh people so that they understand why the Government are trying to initiate this debate and why we are trying to promote Welsh tourism to international tourists.
For Government, tourism obviously brings more income to boost the local economy as well as bringing new cultural encounters and diversity to society, but for people living in Wales this needs to be translated into real benefits for the residents. What are the real benefits? For some of the residents, this may be having more tourists coming to their shops, visiting their restaurants, staying in hotels, going to theme parks or adventure experiences. However, for some this may be something else.
I do think that to get the communication right, more research is needed to talk to the local residents in terms of the benefits for them in bringing more international tourists and how they could be convinced, what kind of communication message we should use, when we try to speak to them and persuade them.
Q168 Chair: Do you think Welsh people are less positive about international tourists than domestic tourists?
Professor Yen: That is an interesting question. I don’t think that Welsh people are less keen about international tourists. There are a lot of narratives about having tourists coming in and buying a second property, hence the local people end up not having enough property to buy and no places to stay. I think in general they are fearful of tourism destroying the tranquillity and current state that they have. Hence I do think it is important to show them and to help them understand when we bring more tourism income to boost the economy how that translates to direct benefits for each individual and household in Wales.
Q169 Chair: Do you think we have a challenge with Snowdon, for example, which I think probably attracts most visitors to Wales? We have had news reports suggesting that it is full, it is creating environmental damage. There are other parts of Wales, the city of St David’s for example in Pembrokeshire, the smallest city in Britain, which feels very full. Certainly, it is the opinion of a lot of local people that at the height of the tourism season there are just too many people and cars.
What advice would you give to the tourism bodies about how you balance growth, attracting ever more people and that desire and ambition with things such as the environmental agenda and the net zero agenda? Welsh Government have declared a climate emergency over Wales. How do we keep these things in proportion?
Professor Yen: I think we should look at how Portmeirion manage it. I think Portmeirion does it well, because it sets a limit in terms of every day, “This is the number of visitors we are allowing to come in and experience the tourism product”. Setting a limit is not necessarily a bad idea, because it also sends a signal to prospective tourists that this is something special. Hence it is exclusive to a certain number per day. That is something we could definitely consider and then we can encourage international tourists to prebook. Hence they are guaranteed entry to these kinds of places.
Then, because we have number control we can do better in terms of offering those tourists coming for the day a good experience so that they come out and say, “This is brilliant, definitely worth going for, book your ticket ASAP so that next time when you come you get to go up the mountain, you get to go into this particular castle, or try this particular trail”. There are many different ways to go about it, but that does not mean that we should be scared about welcoming international tourists to Wales.
Q170 Chair: Professor Pritchard, do you have anything to add to that?
Professor Pritchard: They are all great points. We have not had the conversation about international visitors in Wales, because we tend to not get that many of them. There are a couple of honeypot destinations that obviously get visitors, but the international visitor is the best kind of visitor you can get. They come to a country, they spend a lot of money, they go to key points usually on some sort of trail or experience package and then they go away and hopefully they tell their friends and relatives that they have had a great time and they are encouraged to come back as well. They spend a lot of money proportionately in the economy.
I went to Ireland ages ago and I spoke to a tourism operator there and they said, “Oh, we just want the Americans. The Americans spend all the money. We are not bothered with anybody else. Just send us Americans”. Because we are so focused on the domestic tourism industry, there is a lack of strategic awareness of what the international visitor offers. I think the international visitor could be distributed more around different parts of Wales, which would help to overcome some of this honeypot hot spotting that we are getting at the moment.
Anthony Pickles: Over-tourism is an issue globally, and it is why the Welsh Government are talking about a tourism tax. Ultimately, why should local residents pay for the amenities that tourists use? That is happening the world over.
The way you can do it is either you have a focus on the shoulder season, which Wales does very well and much better than the other nations, so getting people visiting beyond the core summer months is one way that you can do it, so that is spread and takes away some of the impact. It is ultimately about knowledge. All of this comes down to knowing what is available to you.
We all have our own little secrets about Wales that we do not want people going to them, but they are our secrets because they are great places. Wales is developing an interesting food tourism scene at the moment. We saw with the Michelin Guide earlier in the year some incredible food offers now that are better than pretty much anywhere else in Britain. That in its way will drive visitors.
The other thing is how you get people away from the key purpose of their visit. If you have a business visitor, how do you keep them there, how do you get them to do a golfing weekend, or whatever it is that business people do? If you have someone coming for the rugby, we know that Wales is the second top destination for sport in the UK. How do you get people to use the moment of coming to Wales primarily for the rugby but for football also, and get them out and about, do the weekend in Pembrokeshire or in Caerphilly Castle in the new hotel? Wherever it is, there is an opportunity to build on the primary cause, and that ultimately comes down to knowledge.
Q171 Wayne David: In terms of visitors, I think we are agreed that international visitors are the people to aim for. In terms of domestic business, Cardiff does extremely well at the moment. I was reading the other day it is the second top weekend break destination in the UK. In terms of visitors from abroad, where should our target be? Anecdotally, I often speak to Americans, and if I am in the States I tell them about Wales and they are fascinated by what I have to say. They say, “We would love to come there. We have not heard about this”. Would you see the United States as still the core market, or do you think there is much to be said for developing an advertising strategy in Europe also?
Anthony Pickles: The US is the most important source for the long-haul market. The reason for that is obvious—you have that fantastic connectivity across the Atlantic. Again, they are coming in primarily to London airports, so it is how you get them from there into Wales. That comes back to that issue around product and making it easy for people to be able to do it. If you get off the plane at Heathrow, how do you get to Solva or wherever?
The other reason international visitors are preferable in terms of the economic input is what they spend. It is almost double what a day tripper will spend. If you look at the Welsh data for this, in the year before the pandemic you had 87 million day trips in Wales, so people who were just coming in and going back out again, primarily, compared with 10 million people who stayed the night. That will be a mixture of domestic and international. They are the ones who you want more of. It is completely out of kilter.
For me, I think the US is an untapped resource for Wales, because you have the clear heritage link there. We know that American visitors often like to travel for heritage, and they just will not know as much as they should about their links to Wales. I cannot remember what percentage it was of the declaration of independence signed by Welsh people. It is some high and substantive number. Why doesn’t Wales make more of that? It is an incredible thing and if you were France or Germany you would be doing that and it is just not happening here.
Q172 Wayne David: A Welshman helped to draft the first French constitution as well.
Anthony Pickles: There you go.
Q173 Wayne David: We agree on what is being done for the United States, but in terms of Welsh links to Europe, I am thinking of the cultural links of Brittany, for example, and the strong historic links of Bardi in Italy with Italian migration taking place. Are these areas that could be explored in a strategic way?
Anthony Pickles: As international source markets, those European markets—France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands—are always going to be rich pickings because they are much closer. It is always going to be much more affordable for them to come to Wales. The links are probably going to be fairly straightforward, so it does not necessarily just have to be Cardiff. You have Manchester, Bristol and Birmingham airports, which are all within easy feeding distance into destinations across Wales.
The marketing there is more straightforward as well, because the euro is a much easier marketing currency than the dollar sometimes, because of the fluctuations. If you set out your marketing budget at the beginning of the year it is often more consistent with the euro than it ever would be with the dollar or the yen. That should definitely be a focus and it is something where Visit Wales should work with VisitBritain. VisitBritain has, I think, about 10 offices in the European markets. Visit Wales has a number as well. That is where they should be working. They should be working with the trade, working with partners, working with the airlines to get the product understood and so that it is much easier. It is that customer journey that is the key thing here.
Q174 Ruth Jones: You talked about social media earlier, and there were some fairly interesting comments about the fact that there is no link and the websites are not joined-up thinking. What would you do if you were given a blank sheet? What would you do differently to make it better, so that there is a better social media presence for Wales as a tourist destination? Professor Pritchard?
Professor Pritchard: Visit Wales I think is doing quite a lot of engagement on social media, and VisitBritain is doing that too. What you get is that the Welsh offer in the VisitBritain social media engagement is not very strong, as Professor Dorothy alluded to earlier on. It is all about creating that buzz that we like to talk about, that experiential drive, reassuring people that there are many interesting things to do here, getting those Instagram moments, getting the click through, getting the likes by influencers and things like that. I do think there is so much scope to promote essentially what Professor Dorothy has talked about in her evidence submission.
We need to engage much more with social media. That is the future. That is how people decide what they want to do, but you cannot forget things such as friends and family. They are also heavily influential in terms of how people make their travel choices. It is a balance between the two things, but we need to get the brand right and then we can use the things that we know are going to appeal to people. If you have footage of baby puffins, then that is going to be a crowd pleaser on social media, because that is the sort of thing that people like, and it gets shared and goes viral very quickly. There are all sorts of things that you could do in that respect.
Q175 Ruth Jones: Professor Yen, assuming that we have the product right, what would you be doing on social media? What changes would you make?
Professor Yen: I would start with more promotion on Instagram because Instagram is the social media channel that is very much image-based, which is perfect for promoting tourism. Twitter has its use but is less relevant in terms of promoting tourism. Instagram is definitely the place.
When I was looking at the Visit Wales Instagram account, I realised they did a brilliant job. There are loads of really nice photos. They look brilliant and it makes me feel I want to visit those places just by looking at those pictures.
One small suggestion I would make is for better use of hashtags. I realise when they use hashtags they are very direct to Wales, but they did not use the hashtag like VisitBritain. I would suggest Visit Wales tapping into VisitBritain’s hashtag, so when international tourists are looking at Britain they see Wales coming up. Even if VisitBritain is not creating the content themselves, Visit Wales could do that, in a way feeding into the lack of prominence in terms of promoting Wales by the VisitBritain site. That is one suggestion.
Another thing I would suggest is to consider using social media influencers. For example, we talked about those European markets. Nowadays the young people are really buying into this influencer marketing. We can identify some savvy tourist influencer and get them to do a little video about promoting Wales in their own country. That kind of content tends to go viral.
We are on very little budget here. We pay them and invite them to visit Wales and do a tour around and do their own content creation and then the target audience, the young or the savvy or the more advanced international tourist who can come to Wales easily from Europe can watch those and say, “Oh, this is a great place. We want to go”. Of course, the reference to the dragons and legends can be threaded in, in those kinds of conversations.
Q176 Ruth Jones: That makes sense. Mr Pickles, do you have anything to add?
Anthony Pickles: I agree with everything that has been said. The role of social media within the tourism offer is aspiration and inspiration. Many people now make their decisions based on what they see. It is that, “Oh, I really want to go there and how do I do it?” That is its purpose.
It is also a very cheap way for national marketing boards like VisitBritain and Visit Wales to access tourists because it does not cost very much to reach a diverse and wide audience. Instagram was referenced. It has millions and millions of daily users. If you have your content right and you can tap into that aspirational aspect, you can turn things around.
The people to do it authentically are those great Welsh people who can tell the story in the best way possible, so anyone from Gareth Bale through to Huw Edwards is a great type of ambassador for Wales and have great followings. People might know they are Welsh, but they might not necessarily know very much beyond that.
Finally, the other thing that is so useful about the way that social media encourages people to travel is that one of the trends that we have seen over the last 10 years is that people are moving away from doing big breaks to little and often throughout the year. This is one way where you can encourage people to dip their toe in and give somewhere near a try. Social media is a critical tool in enabling that.
Q177 Chair: I am going to bring Rob Roberts in soon but, Professor Yen, what do you believe are the aspects of a destination brand that are most valued by young people? Have you done any research in this area?
Professor Yen: For young people it is always about experience. It is not about consumption or service. It is about consumption, consuming tourism as a holistic experience. In the past we tended to say, “Oh, this is a great place. You should come visit this castle”. Maybe the emphasis is not on the castle but how you would experience the castle. For example, you could have a 3D display in the castle or the illuminations or when people come in, you are selling them a holistic experience, not just one part of the experience. I do not know if I answered that, but I think Professor Pritchard has something to add.
Professor Pritchard: I was just thinking about young people. Of course, young people are very attuned to green issues and are very concerned about climate change. I think the fact that Wales has a strong green story to tell should also tap into that kind of visitor, that you can come to Wales and have a green holiday and spend your time enjoying and experiencing, as has been discussed.
Q178 Rob Roberts: Instagram, influencers and hashtags go right over my head. I am grateful no one mentioned TikTok, or you would have lost me completely. I am a numbers guy. Professor Pritchard, you have spoken in the past about taxation and various elements in Wales. The reduced rate of VAT on tourism and hospitality sectors returned to the standard rate in April. What impact do you think that is going to have on how things progress?
Professor Pritchard: I think that is a bad thing for the tourism industry. That is the major tax on the sector, and it does make us uncompetitive when you look internationally. Most countries in Europe offer a reduced rate of VAT on their tourism products, their restaurant products—as much as half, and some go as low as 5% or 6%. The fact that VAT has now returned to the rate it was before is very disappointing for the tourism sector, and it is going to have an impact.
Q179 Rob Roberts: Sorry to interrupt, but where would you put it? It obviously must fit in somewhere, and it is where it was previously. Did it hamper tourism previously? It is always going to feel good when taxes reduce, but going back to where it was before, how is that going to disproportionately impact based on what it was?
Professor Pritchard: If you look at the European competitors for international tourism, most of those do have a tax rate of around 9% or 10%. Some of them are a bit higher but that would put you on a level playing field with your international competitors. We are not just competing for visitors within the UK; we are competing for visitors who go to Ireland, or to France, people who are doing a European tour. It makes tours more expensive. The VAT rate is disappointing for the sector and there has been a long campaign for many years to have that rate reduced. There is disappointment that it went back to the original rate.
Q180 Rob Roberts: Professor Yen, any thoughts on that?
Professor Yen: I do not have many thoughts, but I did think about it. I thought that putting the tax up is not going to affect the market for international tourists, because international tourists decide where to go and where to take the flights to, so they have already gone through a lot of other possibilities. If Wales has something really special that you can only get in Wales, then they want to come to Wales, and whether it is £20 more per flight probably matters a lot less than the local tourists. That is my take on that.
Anthony Pickles: That is what the industry talks about, and rightly so, because that is the tax that they come most closely into contact with. If you look overall at where Britain sits in terms of competitiveness, we are among the most expensive destinations in the world. Something like only 22% of respondents to nation branding questionnaires say that we are decent value. It goes beyond that to the fact that we have the highest air passenger duty, and VAT is obviously one of them, and then visa costs.
Do any of you know how much it costs to get a visa from the States to the UK? I looked it up this morning because I did not know either. It is £105. If you are a family of four, and you must get four visas, that is £400 before you have even started with your plane ticket. Then you get your Wales rail pass and that is £300 for a family of four. Those costs are prohibitive and they are prohibitive for a vast majority of people. What they demonstrate is that VAT is important, but if you continue to double down on add-in costs—whether it be VAT or a tourism tax—you will make yourselves uncompetitive in the marketplace.
Q181 Rob Roberts: Do you need a visa from the States to come to the UK for a holiday?[1]
Anthony Pickles: A tourist visa, yes.
Q182 Rob Roberts: Like an ESTA to go to the States?
Anthony Pickles: Yes.
Q183 Rob Roberts: That is interesting. I just got an ESTA because I am going to the States later in the year. It was about £15.
Continuing on the theme of transport, you mentioned earlier the BritRail pass, which is only available to foreign tourists, which is interesting. Mr Pickles, you suggested in the past the idea of a Wales pass to assist visitors in getting on the final leg of their journey. What impact do you think that would have, if we had one?
Anthony Pickles: There would be two benefits. One, you would drive people who were looking for a bargain, if you got the price right, so I cite the German example as being what you would want to follow. You would do it for a limited time. This would not be a roll-out of Welsh taxpayers subsidising visitors. It would be to test the market. If you followed that example of having a £9 pass that gets you on buses and trains on any of the network at any time, you would drive intrigue, apart from anything else.
The second thing that you would get in terms of value is that it would give you the data that you want to glean from international visitors. You would understand where the sticking points are in terms of ‘the final mile’. You would understand where people are searching because quite often you would be able to get that from telecoms companies and so on, and collectively those things would be incredibly valuable. It would mean that Wales could put itself in the most interesting place in terms of using data to inform its marketing and product development.
Q184 Rob Roberts: Professor Yen, what are your thoughts on BritRail passes?
Professor Yen: I wanted to refer to the Japanese Kansai One Pass. In Japan they do have this kind of pass where you can visit several things and it covers not just the transportation, the ticket, but also includes special discounts to different shops and restaurants. For example, you can offer discount tickets to enter castles, discount rates for experiencing the paid activities and special fares for hotel bookings. All of these are relevant and are only open for tourists on a short-term stay. We can definitely look into that, but the pricing is important in terms of how much we price this pass for.
Again, you will need local tourism providers to agree with the concept and be willing to contribute, because the more tourism offering that is attached to this pass, the more the international tourists are going to find this pass appealing. Hence, they want to spend the money getting the pass first because they know that they can save a lot more later on.
Professor Pritchard: I agree with all those comments. It is a great idea.
Q185 Rob Roberts: Professor Pritchard, is there something that we need to look at just in terms of the international and global tourist market, or is there something that we can do in terms of domestic tourism as well? As a border constituency in the east of Wales I get an awful lot of constituents who say they have a veterans railcard, a senior railcard, a disabled persons railcard and they can use it in Wales. Indeed, they can also use it in England, to be fair, until such point as they need to change. Therefore, if I have someone getting on the train at Flint and going to London non-stop on the same journey, they can use it, but if they have to change at Crewe they cannot use it. Are things like that and the way in which UK and Wales passes interact with each other causing a big problem in tourism terms generally?
Professor Pritchard: Most domestic visitors certainly come by car to Wales, so the pass is not such an issue because there are not that many using those transport mechanisms. I don’t have the figure to hand but I am sure you would be looking at 80% of tourists who come to Wales come by car. International visitors might come on a coach trip. Again, it is not developed in Wales, so that would be elsewhere in GB.
That is an issue, and I think, ultimately, if what we want is to encourage green travel, we want more people travelling on trains and buses, so we need to make sure that the service is there and that people can access it easily and seamlessly. Certainly, that is something for the future. I do not think to my knowledge it has come up as an issue here and now.
Q186 Rob Roberts: Thank you. Finally, and very quickly, Mr Pickles, what Professor Yen said regarding the pass that they have in Japan, the Kansai One Pass, is that something when you were with VisitBritain that you looked at and examined in great detail? Was it something that you wanted or did not want? Did you dismiss the idea?
Anthony Pickles: One of the elements of the tourism sector deal was to create a series of tourism zones across the UK, where each of the zones would fix “the final mile” issue as one of the elements of getting that status. You would create a biddable pot of cash nationally that areas could bid in for. For example, in Wrexham you might want to fix a particular issue that has escaped the local authority’s remit or priority but would make a huge difference to unlocking the tourism economy.
I am not quite sure where that got to. I think it probably got lost within the pandemic, but I think it is an area that should be revisited because there are many areas that have issues that need to be fixed for the tourism economy that don’t necessarily present themselves as issues for local residents.
Q187 Chair: We have almost run out of time for this session. I will finish with one quick question and hopefully we can keep it quite concise. Changes in the accommodation available in tourist destinations around Wales, whether that is the rise of Airbnb, or the growth of second home ownership, or the growth of holiday lets, do any of you have any strong views about how that is affecting Wales’s attractiveness or ability to win more overseas visitors?
Anthony Pickles: Airbnb is controversial the world over. We must recognise where it is a benefit to Wales, so for sporting events in Cardiff, Airbnb is a huge boon to their offer. What international visitors are looking for is a mix of accommodation. Not everybody wants to stay in a hotel. Likewise, not everyone will be comfortable with the idea of an Airbnb. It is important to recognise that the market is looking for a mix in its offer.
Wales’s offer in terms of high-end hotel accommodation has become a lot better over the last 10 years. There has been a real effort put into that and that will drive the high net worth individuals, which is important. Likewise, I do not think there is an accommodation issue per se in many destinations, so in terms of that idea of over-tourism, there are very few destinations that will register anything above 80% occupancy in rooms.
Professor Yen: I share very much the same sentiment. I think that for a mature tourist market, you need to give tourists a different type of choice in terms of the type of accommodation that is best suited for their needs. Some people will prefer five-star hotels, but some family tourists probably prefer an Airbnb type of experience. Hence, from a marketing perspective, the more alternatives available to your prospective customers, the better.
Professor Pritchard: I think there is a danger that tourism is being painted as the bad guys in a lot of conversations that are happening in some parts of Wales. With the issue of second homes and furnished holiday lets, there has been a lot of conflation of the two, and I think a clear distinction needs to be made between a hotel and a second home. It has been a problem because maybe some second homes have—for want of a better word—masqueraded as holiday lets, so they may have been able to avoid some payments, so that has led to some local discussions.
I almost have a sense that tourism is struggling to get its voice heard and to tell its story in terms of how important it is to local communities. The tourism sector supports so many diverse communities and there is that side of things. Then there is the Airbnb issue, which I think has massively complicated things. You have seen investors coming in and buying up property and pricing it out of the range of the communities that live there. If they cannot live there, what kind of experience are tourists going to get when they go there? It is a difficult issue. There are lots of nuances to it and I am not sure if all the nuances are currently being teased out.
That is why we need to have a conversation—very much like Professor Dorothy said—to explore why we think it is important to target international tourists, why we think it is important to do this and not the other. We need that debate, and at present perhaps the media storm is running ahead of the debate, so we are not having a clear discussion.
Chair: That is helpful. Thank you very much to Anthony Pickles, Professor Annette Pritchard and Professor Dorothy Yen. We are grateful for the time that you have given to the Committee this morning. I think the evidence has been helpful and insightful and we are grateful for your expertise and time. We will bring the meeting to an end.