There was a great turnout for Destination Harrogate’s autumn Attractions Forum, which took place at Stockeld Park between Harrogate and Wetherby. In summer 2022, Stockeld Park launched a brand new visitor experience: the Playhive, which marketing and communications specialists attending the Attractions Forum had the opportunity to discover and explore.
Several new faces were welcomed to the forum including Harewood House, Susan and Georgie from Yorkshire Mark and the new Marketing Manager at Newby Hall, Alex Mcdonnell. This was also the first opportunity for Destiniation Harrogate’s Place Marketing Manager, Julia Lumley, to attend a forum meeting and introduce herself to key partners.
Julia presented updates for the Gardens and Health & Wellbeing campaigns that have been delivered through Visit Harrogate this year, as well as a sneak preview of the Destination Christmas campaign for 2022.
The perennially popular Gardens campaign reached 110,000 people via paid social media partner adverts, with 3,000 link clicks to partner websites and 41,000 views of the campaign video. This year’s campaign bowed out at the Autumn Flower show in the beautiful surroundings of Newby Hall gardens with “Cinema Botanica” a collaboration between Visit Harrogate and the flower show organisers with archive footage of shows gone by intermingled with glorious scenes of the campaign partner gardens.
The Health & Wellbeing campaign had been in full swing throughout the summer, recording impressive figures and a new foray into outdoor advertising in London Kings Cross, York and Newcastle Central stations:
- 13,000 visits to dedicated web pages on visitharrogate.co.uk
- 51,726 full views of campaign video
- 57,166 people reached via social media advertising
- Over 136,000 impressions via digital display campaign
- Over 5,000 entries to campaign competition
This was followed by an introduction to the next Visit Harrogate website development: integration with Visit England’s online Tourism channel manager, TXGB. Businesses with a booking system can sign up and connect to TXGB for automatic pairing. For businesses without a booking system, TXGB’s own system, TXLoad, can be used.
There was an opportunity for everyone to reflect on summer activity, which included a vigorous debate about tickets prices versus visitor numbers and the trend for late booking – before exploring the Playhive, with the pictures telling the story!
The next forum meeting will be in mid-January 2023. If you are interested in hosting a meeting at your venue, please contact Helen Suckling, Partnership and Commercial Manager, Destination Harrogate: helen.suckling@destinationharrogate.co.uk.
