Tourism Growing in Lancashire
Marketing Lancashire, the Destination Management Organisation (DMO) for the county, today released the official visitor and economic impact figures1 for Lancashire in 2013. They reveal that the county’s visitor economy businesses are benefiting from growth in visitors numbers, growth in revenue generated and growth in employment in the sector.
In the year 2013 visitor numbers grew by 1 million visitors to 63.16 million, with visitor spend (revenue generated) up by 4.4% to £3.5 billion. The industry now also supports 56,137 full time jobs, a rise of 2.4% on the previous year.
Ruth Connor, Chief Executive of Marketing Lancashire said “ This growth is a strong result for 2013 especially as the year before was quite an extraordinary one with Lancashire hosting three major events, The Preston Guild, The Open Golf Championship and the 400th Anniversary of the Lancashire Witch Trials. The PR and marketing activity around these successful and diverse events has undoubtedly raised awareness of Lancashire’s broad cultural appeal and helped bring in an additional one million visitors.
“The visitor economy is a priority sector for Lancashire and these latest figures show that we are growing steadily towards an even brighter future.
“Lancashire already has 20 million more visitors than Cumbria and is the second highest visitor economy in the North West. With a strategic push to raise the profile of the county, and increased pride in on our key heritage, cultural and unique ‘Lancastrian’ assets, we can make Lancashire the North West destination of choice for short breaks as well as day visits.
“All areas across Lancashire have grown thanks to the quality and choice of the leisure and hospitality businesses in the county, giving people strong reasons to spend time here. Confidence in our product will keep Lancashire on this upward trajectory of prosperity and bring even greater success and sustainability to our visitor economy businesses.”
VisitLancashire.com is the county’s comprehensive resource for visitors looking to plan their stay in Lancashire. This increasingly popular consumer-facing website, created and managed by Marketing Lancashire, has over 1.2 million unique users visiting over 4 million webpages per annum and has grown by 30% in the last year alone. Marketing Lancashire is also engaging more with visitors on social media, an area which has also seen annual growth of over 20%.
2014 looks set to be another good year with up-coming events such as Clitheroe Food Festival (9 Aug), Vintage By The Sea (5-7 Sept) and Blackpool Illuminations (29 Aug – 9 Nov) going from strength to strength. A wide range of brand new events are also springing up around the county from vintage fairs to street art, walking festivals to light shows. To discover these and hundreds of great days out visitlancashire.com.
For more information on the STEAM report go to marketinglancashire.com Marketing Lancashire’s company website where news, information and support for Lancashire’s tourism businesses can be found.
<<ENDS>>
For media enquiries please contact:
Anna Izza, Head of PR and Communications 01772 426 459
Laura Crabb, PR and Communications Executive 01772 426 456
Notes to Editors
1. STEAM (Scarborough Tourism Economic Activity Monitor) is the model used by most DMOs, and uses locally derived data from a variety of sources such as hotels, attractions, tourist information centres, events and other accommodation to estimate the number of visitors, revenue generated and employment supported by tourism. The model provides the a continuous tourism economic impact dataset which reveals trends and helps highlight areas of particular growth or in need of support.
2. Marketing Lancashire is the Destination Management Organisation (DMO) for Lancashire, established (1st April 2012). Our activities in marketing and communications, commercial membership and place marketing are designed to grow the visitor economy and develop the profile of Lancashire as the first choice destination to live, study, work and invest.
In 2013 Lancashire attracted over 63 million visitors who contributed around £3.5 billion to the local economy and helped support 56,137 jobs.