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Manchester, United Kingdom — 22-25 September 2009WYSE Archives
Edinburgh investing in youth travellers
Edinburgh, host city of the 2018 World Youth and Student Travel Conference (WYSTC), is aiming to reach 3.5 million youth travellers across Europe with new marketing initiatives. #UncoverEdinburgh, led by Youth Travel Edinburgh and supported by the Edinburgh Tourism Action Group and Marketing Edinburgh, is a digital marketing campaign looking to profile Scotland’s capital as a top youth tourism destination. Edinburgh is second only to London for young visitors to the UK.
The campaign has just received a £40,000 Growth Fund award from Visit Scotland, the national tourism organisation. The VisitScotland Growth Fund supports national, regional and sectoral tourism groups across Scotland to deliver partnership marketing campaigns. Using Scotland’s 2018 Year of Young People (YOYP) as a platform, the partnership initiative looks to encourage visitors aged 18-26 from key European markets to come to Edinburgh throughout the year.
“We are thrilled to receive support from VisitScotland’s Growth Fund,” said Pete Duncan, Chair of Youth Travel Edinburgh. “This campaign is a fantastic collaboration by Edinburgh’s tourism industry and a great opportunity for the city to position itself as the leading UK youth travel destination that can be enjoyed on a year-round basis.”
A key focus of YOYP is co-production, and therefore the special interests were chosen by the Young Scot 2018 YOYP Ambassadors. Ten carefully selected Edinburgh influencers will invite a contemporary from a target European city to join them in Scotland’s capital where together they will create digital content using Edinburgh as an identifiable backdrop. They will then both spread content across social media to be shared by their followers. Target partner cities include Barcelona, Paris and Amsterdam.
“We were delighted to support this project with our Growth Fund award and I am looking forward to seeing all the wonderful content these talented influencers produce,” said VisitScotland’s Regional Leadership Director, Paula Ward. “Partnership and collaboration is at the heart of Scottish tourism and VisitScotland works with local industry to develop and deliver innovative initiatives that grow the visitor economy.”
So far, there have been two pairings, with the most recent between Edinburgh local, Davide Verri, and Nicanor Garcia from Barcelona. They have a collective following of almost 740k, sharing an interest in culturally significant architecture. Verri and Garcia explored the city together and took innovative photos of Edinburgh’s stunning architecture which they will be sharing on their Instagram accounts. One of Nicanor’s photos has already received almost 13k in engagements on social media.
The campaign will also release new digital assets for the trade to use – images and GIFs developed specifically to appeal to the youth market – which can be downloaded from uncoveredinburgh.org.