Well, as they say, Christmas is a time for friends and family and goodwill to all men (and women)!

And having spent a good proportion of Christmas day speaking with and Skyping various relatives and old friends around the globe, it is very clear that there is intense interest as to what is happening in Britain in 2012. I was in Berlin just before Christmas and a huge amount of the end of year reviews in the media from last year all profiled the Royal Wedding and looked forward to the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, the Olympic Torch Relay, World Pride, or the 2012 Games themselves.

So what better time than now to ask the Great British public to showcase the nation and invite their friends and relatives, or to ask potential overseas visitors to invite themselves, to Britain in 2012?  We’ve loaded a new ‘10 GREAT Reasons’ invitation app onto VisitBritain’s highly popular Love UK Facebook page (now with 534,000 fans). All international friends or relatives who receive an invitation through the app will be entered into a draw to win two return flights to the UK, while anyone sending an invite has the chance to win a Samsung Galaxy Tab.

And of course this builds on the similar invitation from celebrities we launched in spring and the invitation from industry that we launched later in the summer. I have already asked my Dutch, French, US and Spanish friends to come this year (but will excuse myself from the prize draw!) -  I now live in fear of them all accepting!

With one in four visits to the UK last year coming from people Visiting Friends and Relatives (VFR), the ‘Share Your GREAT Britain’ campaign aims to build on the £3.6 billion that VFR already contributes to the economy each year.

And as part of the programme we also wanted to provide help and resources for the UK industry to invite back previous and past visitors to Britain in 2012. Under the slogan ‘Share Your GREAT Britain’, the British public, local communities and businesses across the country are today being encouraged to make use of a free online toolkit that will allow users to personalise their greeting and enable them to invite their global network to the UK for their next holiday.

With the announcement of additional funding for the roll out of a GREAT campaign in 15 cities overseas, the toolkit not only gives simple and easy to use tools for UK companies to leverage their own contacts, but also gives an increased number of touch points (in addition to the TV, print, out of home and digital activities), and allows potential customers see more of the GREAT branding whilst also allowing UK tourism industry companies to benefit from the halo effect of the wider image campaign.

So in the spirit of Christmas and invitation can I invite you all to have a go at the Facebook App, to use the free online toolkit if you feel appropriate, and just as importantly wish you all a successful, prosperous and GREAT 2012.

After a very busy summer we are now into the meat of our first year of our match-funded £100million Britain Marketing Programme.

Launched earlier this summer and now in phase two, is the roll out of our global TV advert and we’ve just had back the independent research from three markets - a long-haul one (USA), a short-haul one (Netherlands) and an emerging one (India) - into how the advert is performing in terms of driving visits and changing perceptions). I am delighted (and of course somewhat relieved!) that it is performing really well against benchmarks of similar adverts (roughly 20% above the benchmark in all three markets). We are just over half way through the media plan and already 15 million people have seen the advert in some form or another. The object of the advert was to counter the poorer perceptions of welcome (by delivering a strong invite) and natural beauty (by showing the fantastic diversity of all of Britain) and increase the motivation to visit Britain and find out more. If you’d like to find out more about perceptions of Britain, our very own insights guru, David Edwards, has just released a feature on the 2011 Anholt GfK Roper Brand Index Survey that was released just last week.
 

And whilst the brand activity is being rolled out, in September we also launched the major share of funded activity, the complementary tactical campaign with commercial partners; these have now gone (or are going) live in our overseas markets with Hilton Worldwide, British Airways, DFDS Seaways, bmi, Radisson Edwardian Hotels, and we are starting to get some very promising results, although it is early days yet. The 'GREAT' branding is well received with positive comments received when we posted the imagery on our LoveUK Facebook pages. 

Simultaneously we are planning the campaign to activate the British public to invite their friends and relatives to Britain for 2012. We are in the early discussions with media, travel and distribution partners and will look to have a phased roll out between Christmas of 2011 and June of 2012.
 

And looking to the future, last week we also started to look at activities post the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. We’re already working with our overseas offices, our commercial partners, the tourism bodies for England, Scotland, Wales and London and industry to look at themes, content and product that will deliver cut through. At that point the media circus will have moved on from Britain and we’ll need activities and content that delivers real cut through and relevance to a new and engaged audience following the profile Britain will get during the Games. There are some fabulous events happening in 2013, whether it be the Year of Natural Scotland, the Rugby League World Cup or the opening of an all Wales Coastal Path. And of course some fantastic anniversaries to leverage including the 60th anniversary of the Beatles’ and Rolling Stones’ first singles and the Swinging Sixties.

This week also saw the seven-month anniversary since the triple whammy in Japan of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. If ever we needed a reminder of how fast the world changes, we need only reflect on the fact that since this time last year we have had a credit crunch, a euro-zone wobble, two earthquakes and a second ash cloud storm; so whatever activities we have planned we need to be fleet of foot to be able to change tactics, channels, markets and segments according to events and the environment in which we find ourselves.

Well it’s been a while since my last blog and I’ve been working pretty much non-stop with colleagues around the world to pull together the first parts of the 4 year Britain Marketing Programme; one of whose elements is the TV advertising campaign that we are revealing today.

It’s been at least 10 years since we’ve done any TV advertising so this is a hugely exciting moment. The theme of the advert is the celebrity invitation to Britain, and we’ll be following this up later this year with an invitation from the industry with a tactical campaign, and then in the autumn an invitation from the British public with a campaign to incentivise their friends and relatives to visit in 2012.

We’ve been lucky enough to garner the support of some great globally recognised celebrities including Jamie Oliver, Dame Judi Dench, the actor Rupert Everett, Dev Patel from Slumdog Millionaire, and the original super-model Twiggy.

We have clips of the celebrities in the TV adverts and also longer films where they are promoting what they love about Britain, be that great British food and drink, stately homes and heritage, London theatre and film locations, contemporary London and fashion and shopping respectively. We’re on the lookout for further UK celebrities for future films; and indeed we are also working with local celebrity ambassadors in some of our overseas markets, such as Karan Johar in India, Asha Gill in Malaysia and Singapore and Alex Hua Tian (who is here today to support the launch) in China.

The films have been produced with the objective of increasing the intention to visit and to counter some of the widely held misperceptions of welcome and natural beauty, as identified in the Nations Brand Index. So along with trying to get all parts of Britain (London, England, Scotland and Wales), a mixture of the traditional and the contemporary, and the celebrities into the advert has been something of a challenge. But I am really proud of the work and I’ll hope you’ll agree that it looks great. The reaction to the films here at the launch of the campaign at the May Fair Hotel has been hugely positive and we’ve been briefing UK and overseas press all morning.

And whilst it’s really great to have a TV advertising campaign, we do need to recognise the importance of the power of broadcast within the mega events that we’re hosting over the next two years. We all saw the unprecedented global coverage for Britain that the Royal Wedding recently delivered; and now with, for example, the Wimbledon Championships (which coincidentally starts today), and the Diamond Jubilee and London 2012 Games next year we’re working tirelessly to leverage these events and deliver bookings for Britain. Just last week our press team was working with the largest US broadcaster NBC (and rights holding broadcaster for the London 2012 Games) securing locations for their programming around the Games. Indeed it was Matt Lauer the anchor-man of NBC’s The Today Show who said during the wedding coverage “This is a great day for British tourism” – I hope we’ll be able to look back and say, to some extent, the same about today – the launch of the Britain – You’re Invited TV campaign!

You can find out more about how to get involved in the marketing programme on our website. If you're tweeting about it remember to use our hashtag #VBBYI and to follow us on twitter @VisitBritainBiz.

I was at World Travel Market at ExCel London  for a couple of days last week. One day was full of appointments and the other was for a couple of appointments and then manning the welcome desk on the Britain stand.

When WTM used to be under my responsibility I used to insist on VisitBritain staff who request a badge having to spend some time on the welcome desk. Now it is no longer my responsibility, I still feel duty-bound to help colleagues on the reception desk….and in fact, I really enjoy it! You get a great chance to find out what the general mood of operators is (as well as tell people where to get information on outbound and where the facilities are!). The general mood on our stand seemed very positive – lots of demand for London 2012 information and general positivity around European leisure travel this year, countered by some concern around hotel rates and availability in London for 2011 as well as for 2012 - so a generally positive, but mixed bag there.

The general feeling was very positive and the Britain stand seemed busy on the days I was there – busier than most other stands in the hall. Both the UK & Ireland Hall and the Britain stand had an excellent location, right by the entrance which I am sure helped. As did the lighting; such a simple element of any stand build and one that most stand-holders seem to neglect I think. And of course it helped that we shared the Britain stand with UKInbound. This year they had twice as many partners as in 2009, with some great new product which helps to being new and existing contacts onto the stand. Feedback was very positive and I know UKInbound are planning on a bigger presence in 2011.   

Along with VisitEngland, I welcomed the Minister for Tourism and Heritage, John Penrose onto the stand on the Tuesday morning – WTM is always a great induction for any new politician, to see the scale and professionalism of our industry, and to leverage his presence with media interviews (this time for TTG and Bloomberg).

Of the other stands I saw, it was interesting to note the reduction in size of some of our European competitors (for example Spain and Italy) and also to see the massive stands of some Middle Eastern countries. And it was nice to catch up with some new contacts on the Hungary stand to discuss their support of our Destination Britain Central Europe sales mission in February 2011.

Reed Travel Exhibitions haven’t got in the full audited figures, but are suggesting that both the Monday and Tuesday were up in terms of visitors by 21% and 18% on 2009 and I know they had a net increase of 200m². In a digital age it is fascinating to see the continued success of a live event – of course live events engage every sense and allow for true permission marketing so have a valid future, particularly in such a human industry as travel and tourism. I suspect that there is less contracting that takes place when compared with when I first attended WTM with a sheaf of contracts to be signed; and that as big an emphasis goes on meeting up with existing clients and establishing contact with new ones; Reed would also suggest that £1.139 billion of business was done in 2009 so still an important event in our calendar.

Whilst the weather was predictably poor, access has definitely improved and my top tip for visitors for 2011 would be to take the shuttle buses from Canning Town instead of the DLR – just as quick and not so busy….but don’t tell everyone!

News last week of Eurostar’s planned £700 million investment in its fleet has caused me to think of the huge changes that we’ve seen in cross channel traffic in the past 20 or so years. It was only 16 years ago that the Tunnel opened (even though it was first considered nearly 200 years before that).

Prior to its opening there were some strange and wonderful (if slightly less efficient) ways of crossing the channel; living in a truly Francophile household I can just about remember my father piling us into the Ford Cortina estate and taking it, and us, on an airplane from Lydd to Le Touquet (quite an experience) and of course the Hovercraft from Dover and Folkestone to Boulogne was an incredibly exciting experience for a young lad (too exciting I recall on one occasion, when one winter, travelling to France on a French exchange, the front windows blew open in a storm and we were forced to return to the slipway at Dover in reverse!).

With air travel having undergone such massive growth in the last 15-20 years (doubling in numbers into Britain since 1993) it is perhaps easy to forget the still massive importance of both the ferries and the Tunnel to British tourism. Nearly 32% of all inbound visits from Europe come by either ship or via the Tunnel (19% by ferry and 13% by tunnel) accounting for 10% of the global spend by inbound visitors. For some markets (the Netherlands, Czech Republic and Hungary) over 30% of all visitors come by ferry alone. And of course, as a large proportion of these visitors bring their own vehicles, it is easy to imagine the economic impact that these visitors have on rural and outlying areas of the country. The leisure visitors travelling by car are by their nature quite brave and pioneering (driving on the left, managing our signs etc.) and keen to get under the skin of the country, travelling its length and breadth.

The investment that Eurostar is committing to its fleet development will not just mean faster (320kph), more comfortable (at seat wi-fi, “info-tainment” and power) trains with a greater capacity (up from 750 to 900 per train), but the trains will also be configured to be more “interoperable” and to be able to run on more of Europe’s tracks, meaning direct services to Britain from a range of city centres throughout Europe. This brings Geneva within 5 hours of London (Switzerland being a top 10 market for spend in 2009) and Amsterdam within 4 hours. With a punctuality already in the 90% range (against a European flight average in the 60% range), and with additional security and luggage restrictions at airports, any journey of less than 4 hours by train is now being considered a very serious alternative to air travel (and of course not including the environmental and work potential benefits of rail travel). Not forgetting of course that, as my friends from P&O would always say, your holiday begins the moment you get on board; not something one can always necessarily say about air travel.

And it’s not just Eurostar – Deutsche Bahn is looking at the potential of running direct trains from German cities such as Cologne and Frankfurt by late 2013. Rumours of Air France’s interest in using the Tunnel are perhaps somewhat wide of the mark, as the area of strongest interest will surely be in connecting the Air France hub at Charles de Gaulle with the KLM hub at Schiphol. With the Secretary of State’s ambition to produce the best tourism marketing plan that any Olympics host country has ever had, the ferries and trains will have a key role to play and a benefit to gain.

And whilst the future for land and sea crossings looks secure and relatively bright, it does cause me to wonder how my son and daughter will be travelling to and from Europe in 10 years’ time – what is for sure is that I won’t be asking him (as my father did me delightedly) to wear a T-shirt to Le Touquet with a picture of Napoleon with the words “Loser” underneath (I kid you not)!