Notes of Cairngorms Tourism Emergency Response Group Meeting

Cairngorms Tour­ism Emer­gency Response Group Monday 4^th May 2020 Note of Meet­ing 1.Welcome and intro­duc­tions Present: Mur­ray, Janet, Heath­er, Alistair, Chris F, Pete, Rhona, Mark, Chris T Apols: Laurie, Colin, Grant 2: Busi­ness Sup­port updates: HIE: The launch of the new Pivotal Enter­prise and Cre­at­ive, Tour­ism & Hos­pit­al­ity Industry Hard­ship Funds on Thurs has been very chal­len­ging. The funds have been inund­ated with applic­a­tions, IT sys­tems could not cope and many applic­a­tions were wrongly rejec­ted as not eli­gible for sup­port. There were com­plic­a­tions and issues with the online applic­a­tion, but this has been worked on all week­end, and busi­nesses are now encour­aged to re-apply. Fund­ing will no longer be alloc­ated on a first come, first served, and applic­a­tions will now start to be con­sidered this after­noon or tomor­row. Enter­prise agency staff will do eli­gib­il­ity checks and apprais­al of sup­port. It was noted that the form was dif­fi­cult to com­plete and lots of busi­nesses are still strug­gling with it. There was con­cern about wheth­er funds would be suf­fi­cient to meet demand and the man­age­ment of busi­ness expect­a­tions. Aber­deen­shire Coun­cil: As of Fri­day, over 2500 of the grant applic­a­tions had been pro­cessed, and the newly self-employed grant launched with 100 applic­a­tions so far. There are lots of ineligible applic­a­tions, some still fall­ing between the gaps, or based in oth­er LA areas. A report on plans for the council’s own Aber­deen­shire busi­ness scheme will be going to com­mit­tee next week, and it will hope­fully launch in next few weeks. The prop­erty depart­ment is deal­ing with rent defer­rals for busi­ness units etc. High­land Coun­cil (update by email): Plan­ning to launch the new scheme for mul­tiple prop­erty own­ers tomor­row. The oth­er grant schemes are largely going well- all the back­log is cleared with the excep­tion of some applic­a­tions where we are still await­ing inform­a­tion from the applic­ant. The num­bers com­ing in each day are essen­tially the same as the num­ber we pro­cess each day. For the newly self-employed scheme that launched on Thursday, the first hun­dred or so applic­a­tions are in. The first pay­ments should go out today. Key issues from DMOs CBP: Noth­ing new to report not covered else­where on agenda. VMS (update by email): 1) Moray Coun­cil are mak­ing good pro­gress with pay­ment of busi­ness sup­port grants, includ­ing to self-cater­ers – many have repor­ted that the cash is now in their accounts. Des­pite this, uptake over­all (all sec­tors) is only around 26%. 2) The require­ment of the Tour­ism Emer­gency funds, as announced last week for applic­ants to have a Busi­ness Bank Account, means that many B&B / Guest House oper­at­ors can’t apply. 3) VMS are work­ing on recov­ery / relaunch activ­ity and will share in due course. VA: An ini­tial recov­ery plan will be avail­able next week. Vis­itScot­land Over­view – The latest insights paper was pub­lished on Wed­nes­day and shows a slightly more pos­it­ive pic­ture with con­sumer mood improv­ing slightly. The aver­age lead time in plan­ning trips is 5 months so look­ing at Sept / Oct at the moment. Look­ing at inter­na­tion­al examples of restric­tion eas­ing — for example, in France travel is per­mit­ted up to 100km. Ger­many & Aus­tria have agreed bilat­er­al arrange­ments, but Ger­many has seen the repro­duc­tion ​‘R’ rate of vir­us spread increase as restric­tions eased, which may sug­gest that cyc­lic­al open­ing may be more likely.

СВР / CNPA / CTP open let­ter response. The feed­back to the let­ter was gen­er­ally pos­it­ive, with a few isol­ated neg­at­ive com­ments on social media. In press cov­er­age, some art­icles picked up on key work­er har­ass­ment in head­lines, but also included the wider pos­it­ive mes­sages from the let­ter. We should con­tin­ue to encour­age any con­cerns to be repor­ted to trad­ing stand­ards / police / CNPA as appro­pri­ate. It was agreed that mes­saging will be a chal­lenge as we move from simple to more com­plex mes­sages around restric­tions eas­ing. Coun­tryside man­age­ment issues. There have been a few access issues raised, but no more than nor­mal. Liason con­tin­ues with oth­er agen­cies through eg. ENFOR group meet­ings (Pete) and Nation­al Parks UK (Heath­er) to pos­it­ive con­sist­ent and clear mes­saging about appro­pri­ate access beha­viour Update: Grant is also attend­ing reg­u­lar meet­ings with key agency and NGO CEOs. CNPA have iden­ti­fied 40 key vis­it­or sites that may have man­age­ment issues as restric­tions ease. It was agreed that vis­it­or man­age­ment issues must be based on the best sci­entif­ic evid­ence about trans­mis­sion rates and issues spe­cif­ic to the coun­tryside, but it’s dif­fi­cult to find this inform­a­tion at the moment.

• STERG nation­al action plan & new coun­tryside sub-group – Mur­ray. A new STERG sub­group is being setup to advice on coun­tryside and access issues and CNPA will attend. More inform­a­tion will be cir­cu­lated when avail­able. 3.Reset:

• Over­view of con­sumer insights and oth­er research. Heath­er ran through some of the recent con­sumer research and flagged up the weekly BVA-BRDC atti­tude track­er as a use­ful bit of wider research. ‑VS mar­ket­ing intel­li­gence ²⁹⁄₄ ‑ALVA Attrac­tions Recov­ery Track­er ‑Domest­ic Cov­id 19 track­er VE/VB Cur­rent com­mu­nic­a­tion pri­or­it­ies. A key pri­or­ity will be to engage res­id­ent audi­ences about access but also import­ance of tour­ism to eco­nomy, to reduce con­flict with­in and between com­munit­ies as lock­down eases. This needs pro­act­ive PR & mar­ket­ing around keep­ing com­munit­ies, staff and vis­it­ors safe and will need to hap­pen quickly. ​‘Vis­it­ors’ could be from the next vil­lage, as move­ment restric­tions slowly ease. Pete is pulling togeth­er a meet­ing with land and vis­it­or man­agers to dis­cuss Comms mes­sages and will include Mark. CBP ​‘pre­pare to open’ work­shops and vir­tu­al round table min­is­teri­al meet­ing on ⁷⁄₅ The first work­shop took place last Fri­day & the next is tomor­row (Tues) look­ing at how busi­nesses open and instill con­fid­ence in staff, vis­it­ors and com­munit­ies, and col­lab­or­ate to encour­age vis­it­or spend and a pos­it­ive cus­tom­er exper­i­ence. An Ipsos Mori poll found that 60% of folk don’t want to vis­it and 30% don’t want to work. On Thursday a Q&A ses­sion is planned for 60 CBP mem­bers with Kate For­bes and Fer­gus Ewing. The next CBP Busi­ness Baro­met­er closed in mid-April and will be pub­lished soon. Ini­tial res­ults are also in from the Pre­pare to Open sur­vey, and Mark will share full res­ults ahead of next week, but avail­ab­il­ity of work­ing cap­it­al is a real chal­lenge for many busi­nesses as they look to re-open. 4.Restart SG frame­work for decision mak­ing and fur­ther dis­cus­sions. Noth­ing to report at this stage. 5.Recover CNP recov­ery plan. CNPA recov­ery plan will go to the board in June, but a draft will be shared with the group next week after inform­al dis­cus­sion with board on Fri­day this week. Last Fri­day saw a dis­cus­sion on it with key pub­lic part­ners. 6.Any Oth­er Updates ‑Pro­mo­tion­al fly­er for the Cairngorms Nature 10 day event has been cir­cu­lated to the group.

• Janet thanked every­one for par­ti­cip­at­ing. Let Janet, Mur­ray or Heath­er know if you have any sug­ges­tions to make the meet­ings more use­ful. 7.Date of next meet­ing. Next Monday 11^th May. RESPOND (March 2020 – May 2020) Imme­di­ate pro­vi­sion of inform­a­tion and sup­port to busi­nesses RESET (June 2020 – Septem­ber 2020) Sup­port, plan­ning and pre­par­a­tion for restart RESTART (June 2020 – Feb­ru­ary 2021) Sup­port and guid­ance for safe re-open­ing RECOV­ER (Septem­ber 2020 – Decem­ber 2022) Guid­ance and sup­port for oper­at­ing in a new post COV­ID-19 envir­on­ment Remit of Group: The group has been set up to provide con­sist­ent and com­pre­hens­ive ana­lys­is of the implic­a­tions of Cov­id-19 for tour­ism, to coordin­ate com­mu­nic­a­tions with the tour­ism industry, ensure close work­ing between key agen­cies and the private sec­tor, to gath­er, share, facil­it­ate, inter­pret and dis­sem­in­ate inform­a­tion and agree rel­ev­ant actions and deliv­ery plans. Mem­ber­ship: The Group con­sists of rep­res­ent­at­ives from Cairngorms Busi­ness Part­ner­ship, Vis­it­Ab­er­deen­shire, MoraySpey­side, Vis­itScot­land, Aber­deen­shire Coun­cil, The High­land Coun­cil, High­lands and Islands Enter­prise and CNPA (Chair).