Wigtown Book Town, Kirkcudbright Artists’ Town and Castle Douglas Food Town are working together to attract more visitors to Glorious Galloway.
The recently formed Glorious Galloway Tourism Consortium has become the first group in Dumfries & Galloway to receive VisitScotland Challenge Funding. £24,000 of VisitScotland’s Challenge Fund has been awarded to the group, made up of over 90 tourism businesses in Galloway. £10,000 has also been awarded by Dumfries & Galloway Council.
The Glorious Galloway activity will promote seasonally driven special offers, events and businesses in the area in order to increase the amount of visitors coming to the Galloway region throughout the year, especially in the quieter shoulder months. The key message will be that Glorious Galloway is ‘F.A.B.’ (for Food, Arts and Books).
Angela Everitt, President of the Wigtown Chamber of Commerce who chairs the Glorious Galloway Tourism Consortium, commented: “We appreciate the support of VisitScotland as well as the Council and are pleased that we are working in partnership, actively helping to promote Galloway. I am hopeful that the partnership between the three theme towns will develop from strength to strength – we can do so much more together.”
The group’s marketing campaign includes the creation of a Glorious Galloway portal website which will promote themed short breaks to specific target markets and act as a link to existing websites that may not have the opportunity to be promoted as strongly in the past. Promotional leaflets will be created to highlight what the ‘Glorious Galloway’ area has to offer visitors and direct people to its ‘Glorious Galloway’ FAB website.
The whole campaign will be supported by high quality A5 brochures which will be sent out, on request, from the website. The group will also undertake press activities and intend to send editorial pieces and press packs to appropriate media including lifestyle magazines and targeted newspapers within a three to four hour radius of Glorious Galloway.
Castle Douglas Food Town, Kirkcudbright for Arts and Wigtown Booktown, has individual initiatives to promote these themes and organise events during the year. The natural progression was for these groups to collaboratively market the area taking a more holistic view of the products available.
Over the next few months, VisitScotland will be re-assessing the Challenge Fund, taking account of learnings to date and in particular considering how these can be built upon for the future. The concept of developing a fund to accelerate growth will be explored with a view to rolling this out from late autumn to assist the tourism industry reach the ambitious 50% growth target by 2015. For more information about VisitScotland’s challenge fund, log onto: www.visitscotland.org/challenge_fund.
For further information on the Glorious Galloway Tourism Consortium, please contact either angelaeveritt@fsmail.net, katygraham@dumgal.gov.uk, stephengroome@btinternet.com or john@wigtown-booktown.co.uk
