Englands Historic Cities Welcome Strand

England’s Historic Cities is a consortium of 13 cities who have history of collaborative working for over a decade, the group is an important strategic network that seeks to add value by working together. The cities involved in the consortium are;
• Bath
• Cambridge
• Canterbury
• Carlisle
• Chester
• Durham
• Greenwich, London
• Lancaster
• Lincoln
• Oxford
• Salisbury
• Stratford upon Avon
• York

The consortium has successfully bid for funding from Visit England as part of the Discover England Fund. The project runs until 31st March 2019. The £40 million Discover England Fund, managed by Visit England has been created to build world-class ‘bookable’ tourism products showcasing the best of England to international visitors.

Project Overview
The project objectives are, by the end of 2020, to:

• Simplify heritage product in regional England making it easier for international visitors to plan and book a trip
• Increase the appeal of England’s Heritage product for US pre-nesters under the age of 40
• Attract 22,500 additional international visitors to England’s regional heritage destinations
• Raise the profile of England’s regional heritage offer, focusing on the US eastern seaboard
• Support tourism businesses to be more effective heritage ambassadors and advocates for their destination
• Strengthen relationships between heritage destinations and national heritage organisations and between regional heritage destinations and London.

This project is a round 2 Discover England Project and will be delivered through four strands of activity;

Curation
Interpretation
Distribution
Welcome

This brief is specifically focused on the Welcome strand of the project.

Welcome Strand
Ensuring the in-destination welcome and service is top quality and that front-line staff are ambassadors for both their local destination and the Collection. This involves: training business owners, creating product knowledge events for tourism businesses, setting up seminars (online and face to face) that help front line staff to sell the destination and the Collection, a B2B microsite/resource centre as a resource for training /content materials, embedding the new content generated from the Interpretation activities into businesses communication and marketing channels.