Matthews Associates were commissioned as part of the Local Government Association to carry out research to develop Worcestershire’s tourism offer aligned to the four key areas listed above.
Phase one: Worcestershire’s tourism position and strategy – understanding, developing and promoting its offer
The initial phase of finding a solution was to greater understand the wider strategic touristic offer (as opposed to a granular listing) across Worcestershire. To this end desk-based research was undertaken, which comprised of a comprehensive desktop study of the published strategies, plans and policies across both county and district and borough partners. This was supported by a consumer survey and they conducted a series of structured interviews with both public sector and private sector partners, stakeholders and leading Worcestershire tourism businesses. The findings were overlayed with best practice from other areas acknowledged by the national tourist board Visit England.
This gave Worcestershire County Council and the six authorities a snapshot of the county offer by understanding its tourism position and strategy and translating that understanding into developing and promoting its offer. The findings helped identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats facing them going forward. This work would help inform future market engagement activity, focusing resources and avoiding duplication.
Phase two: Working with the visitor economy regarding the support required
The second phase was to look at the function, form and activities of the wider county DMO in terms of how best with limited resources could they support the sector and six partner authorities. It was important to take into account that the recommendations would present challenges for some of the six authorities as for some they would consider the DMO to be encroaching on their local function and for some the recommendations were too ambitious for their capacity. As a result, it was agreed that the report was to identify the ‘art of the possible’ for all the partners.
Phase three: Working in a partnership environment
The third phase was to look at scenarios for partnership working between the county and local authorities, these were developed after consultation with each of the partners. The research highlighted the limitations of a single county geography and the findings of the Visit England report on DMOs. This section was carefully crafted so as not to disincentivise the local authority partners but to focus on where active collaboration could bring benefits to the wider partnership utilising the county support available.
Phase four: The sustainability and funding of the service
The final and most challenging phase was to identify funding opportunities for the DMO, which in the current economic climate were limited. They identified a number of options for the DMO to investigate and follow-up, but understood and highlighted that there was no ’silver bullet’ for DMO funding and across the UK as most were under significant financial pressures.