Hello Alan ,
I have just listened to the proceedings and would like to congratulate you both on a incredibly well presented argument. You put the points across so clearly and succinctly that they were obviously impressed.
Let's just hope that they don't get knobbled by the usual suspects in the meantime and that the campaign is successful.
Well done indeed!
Have just seen the film on your presentation of the petition to reclaim VS.COM.
I was surprised at how well it was received and how informed the committee were already to the faults of VS.
One thing did occur to me, at the end you were asked if there was an organisation that they should write to that encompassed the B&B and Guesthouse community to get a response, and you rightly said that there wasn't one.!!!
We do need an organisation that would, help us/inform us/educate us/etc..
It would be great to have and I for one would happily pay an annual subscription to join a forum where we could sort out our problems which you have so rightly indicated are special to us and do not involve hotels and conference centres etc.
Anyway I just wanted to say congratulations to you and to Liz Chambers on a brilliant presentation and let us hope that the committee do indeed look into the workings of VS and come back to us....
Dear Alan,
I have seen the video and congratulate you on your hard work on our behalf.
It was apparant that even the Petitions Commitee were slightly confused over the difference between VS and dot com. I hope they are now enlightened.
My feelings are:
It is not satisfactory that overseas private companies should be able to cream profits at the expense of the Scottish Tourist Industry and also add to costs.There is also further mileage for investigation into the "loans" made to these companies and their subsequent corporate re structuring- something is not right and the terms of engagement should be looked into by Parliament,as was intimated.
With regard to the statistics offered by VS.com, I suspect that these may be manipulated for headline impact. What I am very surprised about is the inability for them to indicate the hits per page- given the technology employed in creating the booking system. Such information is vital for us to chose between the most effective advertisers vs cost. Most of us small businesses employ hit counters for this purpose as a matter of course. It may be that my own page does receive many hits, but I dont know this for sure. Whatever the case I do know that we have not received one single enquiry via the booking centre in the last two years.
Keep up the pressure. I look forward to the next chapter.
just watched the session at parliament and would like to thank you for your effort . i hope that what you have initiated gains lots of momentum and we end up with a tourist board that isnt just a private owned company out to make a profit.
Watched the committee proceedings this morning - a strong case well presented Well done
I listened to the broadcast - very interesting. As you say, as usual they
do not understand plight of small businesses. See my response to the
parliamentary report on Caithness economy attached - nothing has changed for
the north since the restructure of VisitScotland either.
Best regards.
We think you presented the petition very well to the committee so lets hope they take heed and we fully support you on the next stage.
Dear Mr Keith
Just a line to let you know that we do appreciate what you are doing for us and we're following closely the goings-on. We are looking forward to a positive results. Please keep up the good work!
Kind regards
Hello Alan
Apologies for the delay in responding. We've been away for a few days.
Well done, I think you laid out the case well and hopefully the petition will have the desired effect once the content reaches the inner corridors of power at Holyrood. WE pulled out of all Visit Scotland./ Visit Scotland.Com advertising earlier this year. Time will tell how much effect that will have on us and our business but we simply felt that we could no longer subscribe and therefore appear to support what they are doing to Scottish Tourism in general as well as to individual accommodation providers - the backbone of the tourism industry.
I was very interested to read the document you submitted to the Petitions Committee recently, I am delighted that someone is challenging this situation and feel that you are doing a very good job bringing the complaint and concerns to a broader audience. I watched the video footage of your presentation at Holyrood and was very impressed in the way the case was put forward. I dont think the committee all appreciated the scale of the problem. I think some of them were getting bogged down in unimportant details however the fact that they will investigate further may mean some kind of response from the organisations concerned ie Visit Scotand and visitscotland.com. It seems to me that Visit Scotland should be taken to task over their mismanagement of the whole situation. If they are government funded (and allowed to have the monoploy on tourism in Scotland) surely they are accountable at some level to us and to the government. I dont know enough about the setup to make my point properly but are they not supposed to be working for us. ! we pay fees to join, we become members shouldn't Visit Scotland be representing us in all of this. they are the people who are in a position to contact everyong to guage the industries opinion of visitscotland.com and of whether they are doing the job they should be. Whether Visit Scotland are doing their job, working for us and working for tourism in Scotland is another story but maybe if the politicians at Holyrood understood how badly the whole thing is being run then perhaps some changes will be forced upon them. I hope that some positive changes will be made and am glad that the matter will taken further.
Hello
I read with interest the article in the Scotsman about your campain against Visit Scotland.
I have been in the hotel business in Edinburgh for the last 20 years and over the last 10 years have been involved designing and running websites for hotels. Over the last 10 years the accommodation sector has become increasingly internet driven. I have observed the activities of visitscotland over this time and at every stage they have been left standing by commercial website companies. At present Visit Scotland are one of many internet accomodation providers like laterooms.com , activehotels.com as well as the buget airlines. These companies are run by professionals using the latest computer techniques and 24 hour online booking. The idea Visit Scotland using a call centre is "stoneage". As far as I know the call centre is only open half the week - closed at night and limited operation at weekends which means half the bookings will be lost. The reason it is like this is because visitscotland is a government quango being run by people like Patrica Ferguson. The website was set up in the first place by Henry Mcleish about 10 years ago - he was in charge when they thought of the daft name visitscotland and he spent millions of pounds on a online accommodation system called Ossian which never worked and was later scrapped.
I have personally seen tourism in Scotland over the last 10 years being totally transformed by the internet . The accommodation sector has been transformed and in Edinburgh there has been a vast increase in hotels and other accommodation providers to cater for this explosion in visitor numbers. Visitscotland has become a very small player and have been totally left in the wake of the numerous hotel booking websites. Also the VisitScotland website has always had a very low profile in the internet ie it is difficult to find and is not "search engine friendly" and has always received a very low number of hits. Since VisitScotland joined forces wirg commercial companies the web profile has improved but compared with its competitors it is still off the radar screen.
I think Visitscotland is basically a lost cause and I think they should concentrate on inspecting hotels although the standard of their inspectors that I met has lot to be desired. I occasionally have to take phone calls frpm the call centre staff. Quite frankly the people who answer the phone make me cringe. They have accents like washer women and if I was a tourist and they answered my enquiry I would not be coming to Scotland.
As long as Visit Scotland is run by the Scottish Executive it wiil continue to have a minimal effect on tourism in Scotland
Regards