Visit Moray Speyside (VMS) work as a destination marketing organisation (DMO), promoting the region as an attractive and compelling destination as well as working with and on behalf of the area’s tourism industry and supporting both consumer and b2b marketing activities.

Uniquely in Scotland, Visit Moray Speyside is also regional Tourism Business Improvement District (BID), working across the whole of the Moray Council area. VMS began operations following a ballot of businesses in January 2020.

VMS’ work is broadly split into marketing to visitors and the travel trade, improving visitor experience and delivering business support – anything from digital marketing workshops and social media masterclasses to lobbying and industry advocacy, particularly over the last two years where the organisation has fought hard to secure COVID-19 funding and support for the local tourism industry.

Laurie Piper, Chief Executive of VMS, said: “Our work to improve visitor experience means anything you can touch, stand on, or see – improvements to signage, helping communities improve local infrastructure, securing funds to improve parking, caravan and camper van provision, waste disposal, and also, funding to support communities to operate their local public toilets.

“We’re currently delivering a range of recovery-focused activities with Highlands and Islands Enterprise (HIE) funding, and we work closely with Developing the Young Workforce, a government-funded education scheme to support young learners, and with the UHI Moray College to improve provision of tourism and hospitality education. We also go into schools; we talk to kids and we bring business and education together to seek opportunities around apprenticeships.”

Laurie said building relationships with partners was a key part of VMS’ work: “We try and bring people together. My starting point has always been ‘your neighbours are not your enemy’ and we’re stronger together.”

VMS work with regional stakeholders including Moray Council and HIE, supporting local tourism groups to grow, and establishing new partnerships to help communities achieve their ambitions.

“We collaborate closely with neighbouring regions and similar organisations to promote a unified Highlands, north of Scotland voice.

“We will work with anyone who wants to work with us for the benefit of the region.”

There are currently four people employed by VMS, and other programmes being led by them include the Moray Speyside Golf Campaign – promoting the region as a golf destination, a regional tourism recovery ‘barometer’ and a programme to support more than 40 businesses in the area to prepare their product to work directly with the travel trade.

And what attracted VMS’ employees to Moray?

“Open space, clean air, adventure,” Laurie said. “For me, I like it because it’s got all those things, but we also have this unique little microclimate of super warmness. We’re very dry, and in the summer it can be fabulously hot.

“When people come here, they very quickly realise Moray offers a wonderful community and a pleasant outdoor landscape. It’s not as far away as you think, it’s easily accessible. We’ve got two international airports within an hour or so and it’s on the east coast mainline railway network.

“We’re a beautiful region, we’ve got one of the best coastlines in the world, we’ve got luxury manufacturers and more whisky than you can shake a stick at. We’ve got all the good stuff. And one of our advantages is that we have significant capacity and interestingly, despite COVID-19, or perhaps because of COVID-19, we have a really interesting opportunity now to be able to rebuild.

Laurie said he “strongly believes” Moray has a unique opportunity to reassess the potential in its workforce.

“We’ve got a really good vision but there is a missing generation, where people go to university in a big town or city and don’t come back until they’ve got a family. Unless there is a curriculum here that will support students here, they’ll go elsewhere.

“They think there’s nothing here for them. But maybe they just don’t know about what’s here. To tackle that we’re working with schools, giving them projects to market their region or market their town for visits, and we’re doing a lot of work around languages as well.

“We often say you should be a tourist in your own town first.”

The team is also working to introduce a new higher-level Hospitality qualification, as well as a tailored customer service standard for Speyside, which is being developed this holiday season.

As an organisation VMS is leading the regional response to the climate emergency, signing the tourism declares a climate emergency, which is a collaborative statement of action.

“We’re very aware of the climate emergency at a high level, which filters down to the man in the street,” Laurie said. “And one of our jobs is to help tourism businesses understand they can make their contribution to help them be aware of, and access, support and funding.

“One of the greatest challenges is to help businesses and in fact, individuals and communities recognise the way they can make a contribution.”

VMS is also leading work around the climate emergency response for the region as part of a wider Visit Scotland initiative to help all the Scottish destinations reduce their carbon emissions, while also securing funding from major green developments to support communities.

Looking ahead, VMS is hosting its first in-person conference since the pandemic in May and are working hard behind the scenes to launch a new equitable booking platform, Fairbnb, in the region, which returns 50% of booking fees back to community projects, as well as commissioning a quarterly business barometer for two years, which will measure the impact of the recovery work underway, and a health check on all businesses in Moray.

“There’s hundreds and hundreds of things going on,” Laurie added.

Find out more at www.morayspeyside.com