Local Destination Development Meetings – Stranraer and Rhins

Tourism businesses across the South of Scotland are invited to join the SSDA at one of 14 in-person meetings to agree local priorities, decide how best to promote the local area to visitors, and feed into the development of the South of Scotland’s Responsible Tourism Strategy.

This meeting brings together businesses in the Stranraer and Rhins areas, allowing them to:

Feed into the development of the South of Scotland Responsible Tourism Strategy which will underpin the work of all related agencies, including SOSE, Visit Scotland, D&G Council, Scottish Borders Council and SSDA.
Feed into a local and regional strategy for extending the visitor season.
Work with us to design a short promotional film promoting your local area. This will be funded by the SSDA and available for areas to promote on their own websites and campaigns.
Agree actionable points where SSDA can support the local area aspirations.
Agree wording and content for your local area’s promotion on www.ScotlandStartsHere.com.
Connect, collaborate and share with other local visitor economy businesses.

We recently shared with members our Operational Plan for the next 12 months. In line with the vision and values set out at our March conference, this includes a strong commitment to working in-person with members at a local level, to listen to and be led by their views, ideas and experience. We want to have a genuinely locally-led, bottom-up approach to destination development across the South of Scotland.

We are therefore bringing together tourism businesses in local meetings through August and September. The reason for meeting at what we know is a very busy time, is that we’re keen that businesses have an opportunity to feed into the development of the South of Scotland’s Responsible Tourism Strategy, for which timescales have been set with the two local authorities, SoSE and VisitScotland.