£300,000 wasted on a failing website

Published on Sunday 28 October 2007 01:19

GIVING this amount of cash - £300,000 over three years - to VisitScotland.com is scandalous ('Tourist chiefs widen net', October 21).

Propping up a failing website which does not deliver the goods will not work. What is required is to cancel the current contract and start again with a member-driven website, based on local knowledge, not one that appears to operate only for the contractors' benefit. Maybe the contractors for www.visitireland.com should be given the task. That site is very good as far as accommodation providers are concerned.

The 100k a year would be better spent on tourist information centres (TICs) and more local knowledge bases. Unfortunately, it appears that TICs are in danger of being run down as well, if the Moray Council is anything to go by.

Many of the members I represent are leaving VisitScotland.com as it simply does not make good marketing sense to spend cash with them.

Alan Kimber, Chair of Scottish Independent Hostels

AS THE person who runs www.borderstouristboard.com the website for our own independent tourism organisation, I cannot understand what all the fuss is about. We launched on June 7 and used Google adwords to get going. It is very efficient and able to target the immediate market. To date we have generated more than 12,000 visitors to our site on a budget of 200 per month. 100,000 per year would go an awful long way.

The main problem for VS.com is that Google recognises that there are few incoming links to that site because most of the 'members' of VisitScotland do not think it worthy to provide a link. Watch this space - will VS.com suddenly include incoming links as part of their terms and conditions. If so everyone will be asked to do their work for them. It simply doesn't work on the web if you don't have any friends.

Jeff Slater, Kelso