Our visitors. We attract around 11 million overnight visitors to Wales a year – around three visitors to every resident in Wales – and whilst it can get very busy in hotspot areas during the peak summer months, there is still scope to grow the overall number of visitors that come to Wales across the year. In order to develop sustainably we need to address three key challenges over the course of the next five years:
Seasonality
Spend
Spread
The evidence indicates that certain areas of Wales are busy in peak-season and we need to do more to grow off-peak tourism. This will inform our product and place-development work, as well as our marketing. Visit Wales' own UK marketing will now concentrate on driving new visitors to come to Wales during off-peak periods.
Our fundamental challenge is encouraging visitors to spend longer and spend more in Wales. We will focus on the quality of the tourism offer, making our products more visible and bookable, and ensure that there are plenty of experiences available in our cities and villages for visitors to spend money on throughout the year. We will do this whilst ensuring that our industry isn’t elitist or exclusive.
Whilst we will need to continue to promote the most iconic parts of Wales to new audiences – we will do more to encourage UK and Welsh visitors in particular, to discover new tourism-ready areas of Wales. We will work with regional partners on clever ways to retarget repeat visitors to established destinations with information about new, similar parts of Wales to visit next.
Welcome to Wales: Priorities for the visitor economy 2020 - 2025
Strumble Head Lighthouse, Pembrokeshire
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