‘Tourism must put local people first’
TOURISM strategy should be driven by what local people want – not by the demands of the holiday industry, the Westcountry’s foremost tourism boss says today.
Visit Cornwall chief executive Malcolm Bell, who retires at the end of the year, warns that tourism must be sustainable and cannot be allowed to swamp the areas to which visitors are attracted.
In an interview to mark around 30 years in the business, Mr Bell says Cornish people must have the first say on what kind of industry they want, “even if that restricts the growth of the sector”.
Also, in comments he says he knows will be controversial, Mr Bell warns that the there is no point trying to appeal to everyone and that Cornwall needs to target its marketing towards those who share the county’s values.
He said holidaymakers and daytrippers fall into five unofficial categories – friends, guests, tourists, bloody tourists – and emmets, a derogatory term for tourists.
He went on: “The challenge we have is to get the friends, guests and tourists who get us.
“Then try and convert the bloody tourists, but forget the awkward people who say ‘why haven’t you got this?’, ‘why haven’t you got that?’ It’s about targeting the right people at the right time of year.”
Mr Bell said lessons must be learned from the two pandemic summers of 2020 and 2021, when visitor numbers soared but not everyone behaved well and some parts of the Duchy were simply unable to cope. “We have to tackle the problem of success,” he said.
CORNWALL needs to be able to keep more of the money it earns from tourism, Mr Bell believes.
“We’ve got to get the right balance of the cost of tourism and the cost of improving Cornwall in a fair and equitable way that is easy to administer, because we do get calls for a tourism tax,” he said. “Thirty-three pence in the pound of a visitor’s spend goes to London, so in Cornwall that’s about £600-£700 million. There should be some form of mechanism to get the balance right.
“My view is why can’t there be a balance where we get 5% of all that VAT money back? At the moment, when tourism booms, it’s Cornwall pain, Treasury gain. And why can’t we find mechanisms where visitors are happy to contribute? As soon as you say ‘tourism tax’, one lot cheer and one lot oppose it, and that’s not going to bring us together.”
Mr Bell believes the success of Cornwall’s tourism industry, while negating the impact it can have on those people who live here, is to spread the visitor love outside the peak summer months.
“We would like to attract an extra 10% to 20% of people in January, February and March but no more in August. That extends the jobs we’ve got. I think the two months we’ll never crack are November and January. February you’ve got half-term, so if you get it going in March to the end of October, staff will be kept on. So full-time employment in the sector would be around nine-and-a-half months.
“That’s why we’ve got to look at what we’re calling the Cornwall Evergreen, which is culture, restaurants, the heritage, the wildlife. I know dogs on beaches is a contentious issue, but if you’ve got a dog and you want to go somewhere in the winter, sandy paws are preferable to muddy paws. There are little markets and niches. Another area is attracting the business market to do their planning and reviews between October and March, so come down and do some actual blue sky thinking.
“The new website, which will be finished before I go, is Cornwall For All Seasons and is mainly designed to say what’s best about Cornwall outside the main peak.” He said film and television coverage of Cornwall in the past two years had been welcome – but failed to promote all areas or show people what it is like to live in Cornwall.