´óÏó´«Ã½

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

How very partisan of you Douglas.

The bigger question is why visitscotland is such a poor service. You can't book online. You can find properties but then have to phone to ascertain if there is a vacancy. The booking hotline carries a £4 booking fee on top. In my experience it's much easier to book holidays in the Lake District or Cumbria or France. When will our tourism industry wake up, get their acts together and modernise booking processes?

Tourism Minister Jim Mather had been forced into making a statement to MSPs, and conceded ministers have been in touch with Messrs Cantlay and Riddle in recent weeks.

Translation: he was asked a question and gave straight answer.

I plan to attract German tourists to Scotland by providing a flavour of it here for an already enthusiastic customer base. 5 emails to Visit Scotland as the main tourism contact in Scotland and, after 3 months, still no reply. How on earth is any prospective tourist going to book anything via Visit Scotland? In my desperation and disgust I wrote to our Prime Minister. Within two weeks I had a very concerned phone call from Visit Scotland. My emails fell through the pregnancy-leave, re-organisational and IT update gaps....an example perhaps of a quango in a leaderless quagmire?

I have since had very pleasant and helpful contact with the relevant departments and have the impression that the people at the coal face are doing their utmost, but are straight-jacketed by a direction-less and over-weight top-tier. Many of the Scottish tour operators that I have spoken to avoid using Visit Scotland. So just what is it they do then, and with whom?

Sort it out at the top so the people at the bottom can provide the level of service necessary!

Regarding VisitScotland something had to be done, because for whatever reason, the organisation was failing to inspire and/or win the hearts and minds of many in the industry. My own view is that for tourism to work, it requires passion and vibrant enthusiasm. I think Phillip Riddle is an honest and probably hard working man, but that essential passion was missing and that transmitted itself down the line. Mr Cantley has immediately shown some of the passion needed: he needs to be supported by a chief executive who can echo that and ensure that the whole VS organisation comes alive. And may I just add, that I am not a supporter of the current government, but my experience is that many of their people do show that essential passion about Scotland's tourism.

paying this guy any amount of money to get rid of him has to be a good thing. Visit Scotland has been floundering around for the last ten years trying to attract high end tourists of which there is a finite market. We should be trying to attract more of the 52 million customers on our door step south of the border.

I myself am trying to build a mountain bike center (not easy without capital) to attract 250k visitors to Scotland annually. A development which will be low cost to the end user but will attract thousands to fill the areas accommodation restaurants and shops. Its developments like this that should be getting support from v.s. and they should try to spend less on atracting rich americans to play golf. They need to get their heads out of the clouds and go for volume!

PS the BOOKING FEE CHARGED BY VS for accommodation is a complete RIP OFF for the tourist and the accommodation provider. Time we also stopped this Rip off culture and provided value for money. them just maybe the tourists who do come here might just come back!!!!

When the Scottish tourist industry starts to give value for money , it just might begin to attract tourists. At the moment a weekend in one of Scotland's hotels would buy you a week in a lot of Meditteranean resorts. The cost of meal for two in our hotel restuarants and diners would feed four in the popular overseas resorts and service would be with a welcoming smile , rather than the grudging indifference displayed in a lot of our eateries. As far as the tourist quangoes are concerned, perhaps they should be paid for by the tourist industry rather than the taxpayer. It would be interesting to see just how many Scottish people are employed in tourism compared to the number of East Europeans, who appear to be reaping the benefit of the taxpayers subsidies.

To Kaybraes - VS is a commercially oriented organisation that attracs much of its income from the industry, I know I have paid into VS for years. Likewise I know that much of the team there work to income related targets - arguably attracting income from the industry at the cost of the aim of destination marketing. They have also had to carry the burden of enforced campaings such as Homecoming - overegged and underinvested by the SNP leadership with a not so secret agenda which was less about tourism growth and more about electioneering. And I'm not getting the point about Eastern Europeans being subsidised as most I know work hard for private businesses and not taxpayer funded quangos and as such are 'subsidised' by tourist. Subsidised being a bit of a misnomer of course given that they earn the minimum wage, precisely the reason we can't get Scots to take such jobs. Perhaps we should look the the private sector to raise it's game accordingly.

The 'taxpayers' investment it gets form LA's and our national government is woefully inadequate if you are going to compare its outcomes and success - as someone else has done to say France.

And then we have some regional LA's, such as Edinburgh, summising that they can do a better job and pulling their investment. I wonder how much of this is about a well researched analysis of VS ineffectiveness or more about a misplaced confidence and lack of full understanding of the job required. Time will tell.

I have been in the industry for 20 years - and worked for a tourism related Quango in the past - and think that Philip Riddle has done a great job to shape VS into a more strategic and marketing led organisation. In doing so there have been some bad moves - visitscotland.com just hasn't lived up to expectations and the constant reorganisations at HQ leave the industry disenfranchised. There is also the ocassional sense of superiority emanating from VS who fail to recognise the professionalism and existing marketing expertise of the many small operators with whom they are dealing.

But all in all I think over the last 10 years VS has become a much more professional, strategic and customer oriented organisation. It's quite refreshing that Philip Riddle has concerned himself with building a strong team around him, rather than his own PR.

I say focus on the positives and well, all good things come to an end. In marketing the qualities of drive, vitality, responsiveness without fickleness and product passion are essential and these are hard to sustain over long periods at such a senior level. So perhaps it is time for a change but lets hope Mike Cantlay recruits a new CEO that continues to build on the good work and helps to bring the elments that have worked less well, up to that expected from a fabulous destination.

This was a decision that should have been taken years ago - maybe BP could use another oil man! VS has presided over a growth target which it doesn't 'own' and which it has failed (at every level) to explain to the scottish tourism industry how it goes about driving new growth at a time when many tourism businesses are doing all they can to simply remain operating. The adoption of the Area Tourist Boards was a complete disaster as has been the arms length involvement in the development of Area Tourism Partnerships across the country. VS has and never will own the 4 billion figure given to gross tourism spend - this number belongs to the industry itself plus others like the pub trade. VS lost sight of the fact several years ago that it is the countries marketing agency and should have stuck to being just that. It's good to see that at least some sense has prevailed with the interim of Malcolm Roughead to the top post, a respected and talented marketer who will hopefully bring a little focus back to this important public entity!

I once recall asking PR why Wales, England and Ireland promoted themselves in Scotland but I never saw anything promoting Scotland to Scots (domestic tourism - notably scots travelling around scotland -is one of the largest contributors to scottish tourism)? He just laughed and said I should go to those other countries and I'd see the adverts. Not a great answer but fortunately someone else within VS appears to have now latched onto the idea.

I'd like to build a world class motor racing circuit with associated high technology, value adding, R&D based companies exporting products to the world and attracting some of the worlds most important race series.