VisitScotland is the national tourism organisation for Scotland. Its vision is to be the world’s best tourism organisation. This means that the approach adopted for strategic planning is proactive and futures based.

Scenario planning is the capability of organisations to understand their business environment, to think through what this means to them and then to act upon this new knowledge. Scenarios are a range of pictures and stories of the future that are constructed using drivers and trends that shape the future.

These drivers are manipulated to give alternative outcomes in which plausible and multiple scenarios are constructed for a specific date in the future.

The Scenario Planner
Ian Yeoman is VisitScotland’s scenario planner. He has a Ph.D. in Management Science from Napier University, Edinburgh. Ian is the author of six tourism books and editor of the Journal of Revenue & Pricing Management.

Ian is a member of the World Tourism Organisation’s Expert Panel on tourism futures and trends and his special interests include the use modelling techniques to interpret and analyse scenarios and policies.

Scenario Planning at VisitScotland
The main objective of scenario planning is to give Scotland a competitive edge when times get difficult.

It is the understanding of the dots on the horizon, perceiving, thinking and taking action in a meaningful way. VisitScotland has developed a scenario planning function based upon three clusters of work, namely :

1.  The Scenario Planning Group
Scotland’s Scenario Planning Group for Scottish tourism is a group of businesses and organisations that have come together to find out and understand the future strategic direction of the industry. [more]

2.  Tomorrow's World, Consumer and Tourist
This is a qualitative process of capturing shocks, surprises, trends and drivers that will influence and shape tourism in a systematic manner that makes sense. [more]

3.  The Moffat Model
This is an economic and forecasting model that paints a picture of the present, produces forecasts of the future and measures the economic impact of shocks and surprises on the tourism sectors. [more]

For a greater understanding of the scenario planning process at VisitScotland, please download the following article.

Developing a Scenario Planning Process (PDF 151Kb)

(The above article is reproduced with kind permission by Tourism and Hospitality Journal magazine).

Further Information
For further information on Scenario Planning at VisitScotland, please contact  research@visitscotland.com