Renfrewshire’s Tourism Today; Tourism Plan 2024 – 2027

It’s an exciting time for our region, with the opening of the refurbished Paisley Town Hall playing host to the Royal National Mòd last October, the upcoming re-opening of Paisley Museum, developments and longer term plans around RSPB Lochwinnoch and Castle Semple Visitor Centre and proposed hotel investment announced elsewhere in Renfrewshire.

Eagle-eyed television viewers might have spotted Paisley in the BBC adaption of Agatha Christie’s Murder is Easy, shown on BBC1 over the festive holidays, where Forbes Place doubled as 1950s London and set in motion the rest of the thriller.

In December 2023 Renfrewshire Council’s Leadership Board approved the new tourism plan for the region – Renfrewshire’s Tourism Today; Tourism Plan 2024 – 2027. It outlined four key objectives:-

• To grow the value of tourism in Renfrewshire,
• To build Renfrewshire’s reputation and visibility to attract visitors,
• To enhance the benefits of tourism by delivering the very best for our visitors, our businesses, our people, our communities and our environment,
• To prioritise actions for the private sector and tourism trade and the public sector to further build Renfrewshire’s tourism offer.

The timing works well for the launch of a new approach to tourism. The previous Renfrewshire Visitor Plan 2018 – 21 had concluded. Key successes included the positive impact of investment in destination marketing, which enabled the development of a visitor website – www.paisley.is – a one-stop-shop for visitor information covering all of Renfrewshire achieving over 1.2m unique users. Funded visitor campaigns and PR generated 1.2bn opportunities to see and hear something positive about visiting Renfrewshire since 2018.

However, we still need to be cognisant of the challenges facing businesses, with post-pandemic impacts having merged into significant increases in the cost of doing business as well as skills shortages.

In order to refresh the approach a range of stakeholder consultations were carried out with multiple workshops and interviews, both internal and external, and a sectoral survey. We made sure that we included a broad range of organisations working across Renfrewshire in tourism – from UWS itself, social enterprise, charities and volunteer-reliant attractions, through to hotels and other private sector tourism businesses as well as VisitScotland, the national tourism agency.

Out of these conversations came four priority areas:-

• Tourism Industry Collaboration – To get public, private and third sectors working together to support tourism, with private operators taking a stronger lead across the area.
• Rural Renfrewshire – Growing opportunities around outdoor activities, the natural environment and historic villages.
• Paisley (and urban)– Build on the strengths of Paisley both as a destination and the gateway to Renfrewshire and capitalise on the £113m investment in the town centre.
• Business Tourism – To grow this sector by addressing opportunities for conferences, events, academic and corporate meetings.

A series of cross-cutting key themes which underpin the plan and are relevant to the priorities for future action and investment were also produced.  These focus on:-

• Product and skills development
• Visitor marketing and the quality of visitor experience
• The Environment and sustainability
• Infrastructure and transport
• Events

Developing the Tourism Plan involved a lot of different voices, ensuring that it was developed in collaboration with those working across the visitor economy. Now that we have the over-arching Plan, we are forming a Tourism Leadership Group. This industry-led group will recognise the opportunities, lead on change and as the key starting point will determine the actions to deliver the priorities in the plan.

It is an exciting time for Paisley and Renfrewshire, and we look forward to working with you.

This blog was written by Andrew McKean.

Andrew McKean is the Tourism Officer for Renfrewshire Council. He is Chair of the SLAED (Scottish Local Authority Economic Development) Tourism Group, and Chair of the ICOMOS-UK Cultural Tourism Committee.