Countryside ‘is an untapped market’
New ideas needed to lure city dwellers
RURAL: It has long been a magnet for tourists, but according to one expert, Yorkshire’s countryside is a marketing opportunity yet to be tapped.
Despite the popularity of long distance hikes and farmstead bed and breakfasts, a market is said to exist for activities which rural types have not considered.
IT HAS long been a magnet for tourists whose normal surroundings “lack soul ”, but according to one expert, Yorkshire’s countryside remains a marketing opportunity yet to be tapped.
Despite the popularity of long distance hikes, farmstead bed and breakfasts and locally-made food and drink, a market is said to exist for activities which rural types have not even considered.
“A lot of people will pay for things we are not even thinking about yet,” said Susan Briggs, a marketing professional in the Dales whose past advice has helped more than 7,500 businesses.
She added: “People will pay to do things we do every day because they don’t have your normal life.”
Some 20m overnight trips and 335m day trips are taken each year to rural destinations in England, according to official estimates.
However, a parliamentary inquiry into the country’s rural tourism market two years exposed feelings among some countryside operators that the benefits were “accruing disproportionately” in favour of big cities, and that more needed to be done to spread visitors and their money out into rural and coastal areas.
Rural tourism is currently said to be worth about £18.5bn a year, with 13 per cent of international visitors making a point of stopping off in the countryside or a village. Some seven per cent of tourists visit a National Park.
Mrs Briggs, who lived and worked in London for 20 years before returning to her native Yorkshire, and who runs two tourism networks that together represent 1,000 rural businesses, said today’s travellers were “looking for something different to their everyday” but that many “don’t know what to do in the countryside” and were even afraid to visit.
The clue to luring them from “urban areas that lack soul”, and feeding their desire to get closer to nature, may lie in the increasing popularity of informal hotels known as Airbnbs and in the interest that the upcoming television revival of All Creatures Great and Small was expected to create, she said.
“We need to use that awareness of the Yorkshire countryside,” Mrs Briggs added. “We have places that make people feel healthier. We have a propensity to happiness because of our more active lives.
“There has to be a bit of a revolution, an uprising, to say we are here and we have something valuable.”
She suggested there could be a snowball effect which boosts income from rural tourism, if communities and businesses act collectively.
“Because of the internet it’s become possible. Anyone can access that market so long as they have the ideas,” she said.
Yorkshire’s countryside could also capitalise on being in the centre of England as a place for family celebrations, she added.