Review of Tourism Scotland 2020 Strategy

In December 2018, the Tourism Leadership Group (TLG) – the industry leadership group for Tourism – committed to refresh the national tourism strategy. To inform the refresh, Scottish Enterprise was asked by the TLG to commission a review of the current strategy, Tourism Scotland 2020 on their behalf. Its purpose was to capture the contribution which the current strategy, supporting governance and delivery arrangements have made to the sector’s growth and determine to what extent progress is being made towards the identified key performance indicators within the current strategy.

A mix of desk research, one to one and one to many consultations with industry and stakeholders were used to complete the review and develop the recommendations.

The evidence gathered highlighted a scale and diversity of planning and activity in the Tourism sector not witnessed prior to Tourism Scotland 2020. Successes include: the process of strategy development, and the accompanying nationwide consultation that was undertaken, engaged and mobilised the industry across all sectors and sorts of businesses where there had been little ownership by industry of previous strategies; the current level of industry engagement and the breadth of businesses actively supporting the delivery of the priorities and ambitions of the strategy outstrips anything previously experienced; the strategy has been successful in driving alignment in delivery at the local destination level, evidenced by the number of local organisations and groups embracing the strategy and the rocket. Learnings include: the process of strategy development was new and innovative, but action planning and implementation of the strategy has proven to be less effective; for Asset Blocks, a lack of consistently applied resource to drive and co-ordinate planning and delivery has been a real barrier to effective implementation; the delivery structure varied considerably from theme to theme and destination to destination, which has made it challenging to understand both where progress has been made and more importantly what have been the underlying reasons for it; a definitive assessment of deliverables and progress, and overall sector performance has been a challenge as a result with inadequate, inaccurate and untimely data.

The review includes a number of recommendations and outputs which has formed part of the evidence base used by the Tourism Leadership Group to inform the planning and development of the new national Tourism strategy beyond 2020.