The G8 Summit (continued)

To their credit, Gleneagles are strong and active supporters of local tourism in all its forms and use the Perthshire name extensively in their marketing. There will be opportunities for other local venues and accommodation operators to use this link between Gleneagles and Perthshire to their own advantage to increase awareness of their facilities and services in business tourism markets. However, they will face intense competition from the likes of Edinburgh and Glasgow and are likely to need a lot of support from public agencies to grow market share in what may well be a stagnant market.

So, it is likely to be an uphill struggle to grow business tourism in Perthshire on the back of the G8. But what about leisure tourism?

First off, the G8 Summit brought many first time visitors to Perthshire in the form of police officers, civil servants and protesters. There must be potential to encourage these first time visitors back again.

We may not know who all the protesters were, but it should be a fairly simple matter to access the names and contact details of the police and civil servants. Even if data protection legislation means that local agencies can't obtain these details from databases, hotel registers should have thousands of contact details that can be used for direct mail and customer relationship management purposes.

There should be a co-ordinated effort to send a "will ye no come back again?" message to everyone who came to Perthshire to work during the G8. These people are a ready made audience who have already experienced Perthshire. If we are as good a visitor destination as we think we are, we should be able to stimulate a desire among police and civil servants to repeat visit with friends and families.

However, it is essential that public agencies and private businesses work together to ensure that a clear, consistent and compelling message goes out to this target audience. It is in no one's interest to have individual operators fighting with each other over scraps of business. We must work together.

The town of Auchterarder was well featured in media coverage of the G8 Summit. Most of this coverage was positive about the virtues and attractions of the town. The local people who were interviewed on TV, radio and newspapers came across as friendly and welcoming. If nothing else, more people around the world have now heard of Auchterarder and have some awareness of what it is like and what it has to offer.

This can be built upon to attract day trippers and short break visitors out of more established tourism honeypots like Edinburgh, St Andrews and Stirling.

The experience of Seal Island in Carolina, which hosted the previous G8, suggests that the summit stimulates curiosity that encourages new visitors to travel to see where "it all happened". Auchterarder can use its current curiosity value as an asset to attract additional visitors. However, again it is essential that local businesses work together and work quickly before their advantage is lost amidst the other world news.

And if new, first time visitors can be attracted to Auchterarder there should then be every opportunity to encourage them to explore other parts of Perthshire during their visit.

But things have to be done now. Tomorrow will be too late. People have increasingly short attention spans and the Gleneagles G8 Summit may soon be a distant, forgotten memory unless local agencies and local businesses work together to keep it alive.

I've just done a search on the web under various local headings. It's disappointing to see how few local websites make active mention of Perthshire hosting the G8.

There's the odd reference hidden away if you know where to look but, in general, there is little to remind the world's web users that the lovely place they saw on their TV screen during the summit was Perthshire and shouldn't they think of visiting it to see it for themselves.

(Admittedly this probably isn't too surprising when so many local websites appear not to have been updated for a number of years. But that's another issue.)

So, in some sort of summary, the G8 can be used as a platform to attract additional visitors to Perthshire. That will benefit all local businesses, create additional local employment and help to secure local amenities that can be enjoyed by residents. However, these benefits will not happen automatically.

A lot of hard work went into ensuring that the Summit went as smoothly as possible and everyone involved should be congratulated on their contribution. But the real work starts now. Or should have started on the day the Summit ended?