We’ve been working with national partners on multiple campaigns aimed at sharing important responsible tourism messaging, to protect visitors – and Scotland’s much-loved landscapes. It began as we saw demand increase for these resources rapidly.
Responsible tourism is at the heart of VisitScotland and is threaded through all the work that we do.
Take a look at the results of our key campaigns across 2021 and 2022.
In 2021, following visitor management challenges experienced during COVID-19 lockdowns, we launched our visitor management campaign. Part of a co-ordinated, Scotland-wide approach, it aimed to educate domestic visitors on how to enjoy Scotland’s countryside responsibly.
To deliver this campaign, we worked with a range of national partners:
Through our visitor management campaign, our key focus was to educate, and inform visitors (domestic / Scotland) on a range of important topics and issues:
camping
fires
motorhomes and caravans
litter
water safety
Scottish Outdoor Access Code
Ramblers Scotland utilised the newfound enthusiasm for an audience of visitors, including domestic, who were exploring Scotland’s outdoors for the first time.
As a result, they created a series of videos which positively shared how to improve an outdoor experience and enjoy the landscape responsibly. Their three key campaign messages were: fire safety, leave no trace and poor parking / overcrowding.
2,017,386
views
4,352,041
impressions
109,328
completions
In spring 2022, we launched “Keep Scotland Unspoiled” a new £225,000 visitor management campaign which highlighted specific visitor behaviours we aimed to discourage and change. This included content about litter, animals, camping and more which ran from March – October 2022.
The campaign content showcased the “spoilers”’ behind the scenes with the aim of inspiring more responsible visitor behaviours, particularly across a younger demographic.
This was achieved by including touches of humour in our content and setting a positive tone around the requirement to be responsible when enjoying Scotland.
Key aims for this campaign were to:
increase awareness of key visitor management issues and understanding of how to behave responsibly
drive more responsible behaviours and lessen reported incidents relating to these issues
We promoted the campaign through a mix of media outlets including:
We worked with some of the country’s top content creators to cover a variety of visitor management themes in ways and spaces that resonated with our target audiences.
For the first time, we worked with creators on social media platform TikTok to create content on responsible tourism, to reach the 'Gen-Z' and 'Millennial' demographics with campaign messaging.
The influencers we worked with have a total following of 2.1 million and featured Calum McLean (@caldamac) who was named the “most influential Scot on TikTok” for 2022.
In 2021 Calum worked with us and delivered visitor management content in partnership with BBC Social.
