‘We want the right kind of tourists to come to Cornwall’

CORNWALL’S tourism chief Malcolm Bell warns the Duchy must attract the right kind of tourists who really want to visit – and forget those he described as “emmets.”

Mr Bell, 67, knows he will be criticised for the description, but he said the two pandemic summers of 2020 and 2021 endured by Cornish hospitality should teach the county’s holiday industry important lessons.

Mr Bell was speaking before his retirement at the end of the year and was reflecting on a long career in the holiday sector which began almost 30 years ago.

After undertaking an economic study of tourism in Devon and Cornwall in the mid-1990s, Mr Bell got a job with the Westcountry Tourist Board, which then turned into South West Tourism. In 2010, after council unification, he was employed as chief executive of Visit Cornwall, which after losing its Cornwall Council funding continued as a Community Interest Company.

He laid out his view of visitors to Cornwall, which he admitted had been coloured by the experience of the pandemic, which saw unprecedented numbers arrive, not all of whom behaved well.

“In my mind, visitors fall into five unofficial categories,” he said. “At one level you have friends, then you have guests, then you have tourists, then you have bloody tourists, then you have (expletive deleted) emmets! You can quote me on that.”

“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.”

He went on: “Last year, in particular, should be a salutary note, like burning your fingers as a kid, you learn not to do that again. It’s great having a good road system now but it does open us up, and the pandemic opened us up to things that were quite difficult to cope with.

“In the 1970s, people were in Cornwall because they couldn’t afford a proper holiday and there were a lot of chips on shoulders, and we felt that again in those two years. It had come back around – 25 years ago it was ‘the Westcountry’, 15 years ago it was ‘Devon and Cornwall’ and now ‘Cornwall’ is the Waitrose and Devon is the Sainsbury’s. We’ve really come up through. We made ourselves the place to be, but half the country went abroad.

“Once you stopped them going abroad, we ended up with people here who didn’t want to be here. It’s settled down again now.”

Mr Bell said the rise in tourism has helped with Cornwall’s identity and put it squarely on the map as a place to visit for a certain kind of

‘Tourism in Cornwall has to tackle the problems of success. We have to learn from those two years of the pandemic’

MALCOLM BELL, VISIT CORNWALL

holiday. “Now we have to tackle the problems of success,” he said. “That’s why we have to learn from those two years.”

Mr Bell steps down from his post at the end of December, but will carry on in the background in a consultation role, working on a plan for regenerative and sustainable tourism. Negotiations are currently taking place to employ his successor. He said: “The new direction in tourism should be driven firstly by what the people of Cornwall want, the next thing is improving the jobs and career prospects, and it’s got to be sustainable and regenerative and not damaging. Even if that restricts the growth of the sector, it can stay like that for decades. If you have a year like we had before, we’ll just be busted. That’s the worst thing that can happen. There are businesses that disagree with me, most agree.”

“We are lucky compared to a lot of places as we’ve got a lot of independent businesses rather than chains of multi-nationals, or businesses that are backed by venture capitalists, who want their money. Whereas, down here, most people want to look after Cornwall.”

Mr Bell is a passionate advocate for regenerative tourism which has the people of Cornwall at its heart. He added: “In ten years’ time, we – and I mean everyone in Cornwall, including the council – should be controlling the stock and only having professional providers doing the right things, and there should be a career path for somebody who enters at base level to progress to the level they desire. We should prevent over-tourism. “