Netflix’s Bridgerton series became the talk of the Ton (and the world) soon after it was released on Christmas Day 2020.
Since the steamy period drama hit our screens, more than 82 million households have viewed it. Naturally, this interest has fuelled a stream of content about the colourful costumes, colour-blind casting, tumultuous relationships – and especially the lavish sets.
Such is the fascination with the places that played host to Bridgerton’s gripping storylines that, according to the BBC, Bath, a key set location, is expecting a £1.5 million boost to the local economy, although the full economic effect won’t be known until later; lockdown 3.0 started days after Bridgerton was first streamed. But there are already plans for Bridgerton-themed guided tours and the websites of places used in the series are seeing an uplift in traffic to their websites and engagement on social media.
Some of the Bath’s top attraction’s featured in the series, including The Holburne Museum (as the entrance to one of the ball scenes at Lady Danbury’s home) and No. 1 Royal Crescent (the exterior of the Featherington family home).
Here, Spencer Hancock, Head of Visitor Services at The Holburne Museum, and Dr Amy Frost, Senior Curator of Bath Preservation Trust which operates No.1 Royal Crescent, tell us about their experiences of working with the Bridgerton production team and what you need to know if you’re thinking about allowing TV and film production crews to film at your attraction.
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- Visitor Attractions
If you’d like to enter your visitor attraction for an award but don’t know where to start, this article will help.
We’ve asked Gold award-winning attractions at VisitEngland’s Awards for Excellence 2020 to share their advice on how to submit a successful award application.
Sasha Greig is Head of Visitor Experience, Retail and Marketing at Old Royal Naval College, which won Gold in the Large Visitor Attraction of the Year category, and Nerys Williams is Audience Development Manager at Gladstone Pottery Museum, winner of the Small Visitor Attraction of the Year category. Applying for awards is part of their jobs.
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- Visitor Attractions
As Hollywood sprinkles some much-needed razzle-dazzle over the last few weeks of winter, with Oscar shortlist announcements, the Golden Globe Awards and the Grammy Awards, we take a look at awards for the attractions industry and find out what a nomination can mean for your VA.
You don’t need to be an Oscar winner to know that winning an award is a huge boost to your attraction. Of course it helps improve visitor confidence, raises publicity and opens up opportunities to host more influencer and journalist visits. Outside of a pandemic, a win means there’s a good chance you’ll see visitor numbers grow, too.
But the less obvious benefits to getting involved with awards programmes can be even more valuable for your attraction – whether you win or not.
We talked to two award-winning attractions to find out how the process of applying for awards can be even more important than all the publicity that goes hand-in-hand with winning a shiny plaque at a celebrity-fronted awards ceremony (although that’s nice too!).
Old Royal Naval College (ORNC) in Greenwich beat stiff competition to win Gold in the Large Visitor Attraction of the Year category at VisitEngland’s Awards for Excellence 2020, while Stoke-on-Trent’s Gladstone Pottery Museum walked away with Gold in the Small Visitor Attraction of the Year category.
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- Visitor Attractions
If sustainability isn’t already embedded into your visitor attraction’s operations, 2021 is the time to make it so. And if sustainability is already a consideration, it’s time to make it a priority.
Sustainability was already gaining ground before the pandemic. Just think back to the headlines garnered by Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and David Attenborough’s Seven Worlds, One Planet in 2019.
But 2020 was the year sustainable tourism went mainstream.
Sustainability underlined three of the five key trends in ABTA’s Travel Trends 2020 report. During lockdown, we watched in contemplative awe as nature flourished while human life was put on pause. In June, the One Planet Sustainable Tourism Programme (led by the World Tourism Organization) announced that its new vision for global tourism involved balancing the needs of people, planet and prosperity: “Sustainability must no longer be a niche part of tourism but must be the new norm for every part of our sector," said UNWTO Secretary-General Zurab Pololikashvili. By December, even The Walt Disney Company had upped the stakes in its latest environmental goals.
Then, at the end of the year, Lonely Planet announced a new approach for its Best in Travel 2021 awards. Instead of celebrating the top destinations, trends and experiences of the coming year, the 2021 awards hail the people and projects that push for positive change in three categories: sustainability, diversity and community.
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- Visitor Attractions
The pandemic has changed the way we travel for ever. In the long term, this could be a positive thing.
The most obvious change is the switch to domestic travel. With international travel likely to remain difficult, expensive and inconvenient for the foreseeable, any stigma attached to holidaying at home has fallen by the wayside. And as people discover the joys of the staycation, they’re more likely to include it in their annual holiday repertoire for many years to come.
It’s not just attitudes to domestic travel that are changing. The way we holiday at home is evolving too – for the better. It’s becoming deeper, more considerate and more diverse – both in age and in number of legs!
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- Visitor Attractions
There are many words we could use to describe 2020. Unprecedented. Challenging. Exhausting. But for now, let’s go with ‘An education’.
The year started with cheerful predictions for the rise of wellness, bleisure (a blend of business and leisure), long-term and pet-centric travel, as well as more holidays for kids travelling with grandparents. Significant growths in the use of VR, AI and the personalisation of the visitor experience were also projected.
Then the pandemic came along, putting the kibosh on so many of these projections while accelerating others. In 2020, Covid-19 didn’t so much re-write the tourism industry rule book as toss it out of the window.
Never have visitor attractions come up against such a relentless list of challenges: enforced closures; record numbers of no-shows and last-minute cancellations; high levels of staff absence and anxiousness; the overnight disappearance of the international visitor market; the imposition of expensive but wholly necessary health and cleaning measures; and the need for more investment in digital marketing, to name a few.
And yet. And yet. Among the bombardment of challenges and frustrations, there were opportunities to learn, grow and make positive changes for a better future.
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- Visitor Attractions
They say crisis breeds innovation, and innovations in the visitor attraction industry certainly came thick and fast in 2020, prompting some striking shifts. There’s still much to overcome, but the pauses and pivots of 2020 are proving fertile ground for some exciting attraction trends in 2021.
We’ve asked industry leaders to share their thoughts on the coming year, so you can start to anticipate what 2021 might look like for your visitor attraction.
"UK tourism - the UK's fifth biggest industry and third largest employer - will bounce back from the pandemic but it will take time and will not be without pain,” says ALVA’s Director Bernard Donoghue. “It is unlikely that the UK will receive the same number of overseas tourists that it did last year for a number of years, so in the meantime it must nurture the domestic market, learn to be more innovative, more flexible and more creative in order to be sustainable and successful."
Many visitor attractions have used this past year to rethink their approach so they’re in a better position as we move forward into 2021 and beyond. Stephen Manion, Manager of Arundel Castle in West Sussex, says, “[The pandemic] has made us look closely at our whole visitor experience and ask: ‘Why do we do this?’ And if the answer is ‘because we always have done,’ then it is challenged by us.”
It all points to a year that promises to positively disrupt the status quo.
Here is a sneak peek of some of the 2021 visitor attraction trends we have uncovered.
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- Visitor Attractions
If 2020 has taught us one thing, it’s the need to embrace digital technology. Digital can bridge the gap between home and visitor attraction, helping VAs stay front of mind when visiting isn’t possible and helping guests have a smoother experience when they do visit.
As well as making visits more memorable, apps can be an invaluable window into crowd flow, an effective way to increase revenue, an imaginative way to layer meaning onto existing exhibits and a way to partner with local tourism businesses.
If launching an app forms part of your digital marketing strategy for 2021, or you’re just considering how an app might work for your family-friendly attraction, this list of family-oriented apps will inspire you.
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- Visitor Attractions
As we emerge from lockdown 2.0 into a tiered system that, for many of us, is almost as restrictive, we thought some examples of innovative responses to the impact of the coronavirus might help boost flagging creativity. It’s been a long old year so let’s look backwards for the strength and motivation we need to move forwards!
If you’re searching for fresh ways to boost your visitor attraction’s revenue and maintain brand awareness and engagement, check out these three innovative ways that tourism businesses around the world have reacted to the global pandemic. We’ve included eight specific examples to help inject some real-life inspiration into your next brainstorming session.
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- Visitor Attractions
2020 may have failed to deliver on the tourism front, but that means all the more excitement has been stored up for 2021.
After almost a year of delays, disappointments and frustrations, the promise of effective new vaccines on top of well-honed COVID-19 health and safety measures promises to bring a raft of new visitor attraction openings back to the fore next year, including LEGOLAND New York, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios Japan.
Here, we’ve selected 3 of the most significant new national and international visitor attractions to look out for in 2021.
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- Visitor Attractions
