Targeting Goliath and in with a chance Alan Keith

Published on Saturday 13 January 2007 00:16

SCOTS mythology, ancient and modern, reserves a place for people like Alan Keith: the thrawn "sma folk" who take on opponents far bigger than themselves - in his case the ruling powers of Scotland's £4.2 billion tourism industry - and refuse to lie down.

Keith, a smalltime businessman from Castle Douglas, appeared in front of the Scottish Parliament's petitions committee in November to make his case for a national tourism "shop window" in the internet, free of unfair and - he contends - illegal marketplace distortion. In doing so he raised the stakes in one Scottish tourism's most pressing questions: can the national tourism website, VisitScotland.com, fulfil its promise to become profitable in 2007?

More pressingly, will eTourism - a public-private partnership between Austria's Tiscover, France's Atos Origen, VisitScotland and the UK Treasury - produce the much trailed software that will finally silence critics in the industry grass roots?

Or will VisitScotland.com implode, and Alan Keith, the relentlessly forensic former engineer and builder, prove to have been right all along?

"Oh God," says one Scottish tourism official, at the mere mention of his name. "Alan's a pain in the neck. But I suppose every industry needs an agent provocateur to ask the difficult questions. There is no doubt he is brilliant at what he does."

The fact that Keith, who runs a local website for Dumfries and Galloway accommodation providers ADGAP, has put the tourism establishment on the back foot is down to two flattening factors that have largely negated the best efforts of VisitScotland's Rolls-Royce-like PR operation.

The first is the democratising effect of the web itself, to which Keith's self-taught technical expertise and clarity of expression have made him an adept; both at close analysis of the commerciality of others sites and at presenting his own arguments online.

The second is the Scottish Parliament, which, unlike its UK counterpart, allows citizens a platform to air alleged commercial or civic injustices.

The public petitions committee is currently consulting independent bodies like the Scottish Tourism Forum and the British Hospitality Association on Keith's impressive committee appearance last November.

Later this year the committee will decide how to treat his appeal to have the national tourism website returned to public ownership. If it backs all or part of it, the status quo may be unsustainable, and Keith's model of a publicly owned, technically cutting-edge pure information-and-links website may replace it.

There is also the Freedom of Information Act, which Keith is using to attempt to winkle out the details of the concession agreement that established the relationship between the eTourism PPP and VisitScotland in 2002.

VisitScotland says these details are commercially confidential. Keith says they contain the key to the legality, under European law, of using state aid to boost a commercial entity. A ruling is expected shortly.

In earlier times, where letters to newspapers and protests at public meetings were the tools of the awkward squad, Keith would have been readily dismissable as a crank.

But with modern technology he has proved that coherent arguments can achieve wide circulation, and must be addressed on their merits. So far, neither VisitScotland, nor eTourism, and certainly not the slogan-spouting minister for tourism, Patricia Ferguson, has landed a punch heavy enough to knock down Keith's central contentions.

What is more, their mantra that Keith's views are "not widely shared" is proving hard to sustain. Last week a policy paper published by the Federation of Small Businesses reported scathing grassroots feedback on both VisitScotland and VisitScotland.com.

"Alan Keith's case went down well with my parliamentary colleagues," says Alasdair Morgan, the SNP South of Scotland MSP, and one of several cross-party politicians prompted by Keith's arguments to quiz the minister on how Visitscotland.com is not violating the terms of its concession. They raise eyebrows at the site's giving of advertising space to companies unconnected to tourism in Scotland (TAG Heuer watches, for example), strengthening their suspicion that VisitScotland is violating EU rules by using UK taxpayers' money to promote a commercial entity.

Morgan continues: "My initial concern was that he was merely a Luddite, as there is obviously a role for a national tourism portal. But if that's all he was, he would have disappeared by now while VisitScotland.com would have soared to success. Neither has occurred.

"Visitscotland.com has not been able to square the circle of the conflicting needs of a service that needs to inform tourists properly and the need to make money. Not only are they not making much money, but until they come up with a solution that addresses Alan Keith's main concerns, he is justified in being a thorn in their flesh."

Another tourism industry leader - no friend of Keith - confirms that "patience is starting to run out" with eTourism's personable chief executive, Marco Truffelli, who has been promising an access through Visitscotland.com tailored to small businesses, called "Web in a Box", for 18 months. It is currently scheduled for next month.

Keith's submission to the committee, like his web campaign www.reclaimvs.com was based on questioning fundamental principles that the industry's leadership - striving to achieve revenue growth of 50 per cent by 2015 - says it has neither the time nor the inclination to reconsider. They say, with justice, that the website has improved, both in content and in technical specifications.

But Keith's point is that the priority of a national tourism website is to persuade people to come to Scotland, not to earn commission from selling them accommodation that these committed visitors would otherwise have purchased elsewhere.

And he says it should facilitate contact with private-sector regional or sectoral websites, not discourage them.

He contends that VisitScotland.com has always discouraged direct personal contact between potential visitors and small operators, like B&B owners. The organisation, which naturally prefers to take bookings through its Livingston call centre, had to be pressured to give direct contact details for member businesses.

While there is a clear need for an impartial and comprehensively informative national tourism portal, the need for a national booking portal is more controversial.

As well as the 700 signatories of Keith's petition, the FSB's policy paper - a moaners' charter say some - has suggested that the Scottish tourism industry leadership, for all its prizes, and increasing overseas visitor figures, was not stirring enthusiasm at the grass roots.

For the website, the report went into some detail about "high levels of dissatisfaction with the current operation" of and "confusion about the duty it is perceived to have to Scotland's tourism businesses".

Graham Bell of the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce says: "If there are still bones of contention they must be dealt with in 2007 through open and honest discussion."