Income Growth for Visitor Brands in 2025 – Part 1

6 February 2025

By Ant Rawlins, CEO 

In my last article '2025 - The Year of Competition for Tourism' (view), we explored the commercial landscape for the coming year, which painted a picture of a tough time ahead for our sector. A multitude of factors, including increased staffing costs and reduced consumer spending, could make this year the most competitive that I have seen for a long time. 

However, with challenge comes opportunity and by advising over 50 visitor destinations in the UK, I’d like to share the core areas we are recommending our clients focus on, that will still deliver sustainable income growth, despite the circumstances. I’m sure we are all aware of a number of attractions that have closed over the last 12 months. These attractions range from 15,000 - 400,000 visitors per annum so it’s clear that no matter your size, if you can’t compete, you might end up closing. Here goes…

One - Revisit your value proposition 

Understanding your value proposition is more important now than ever, especially when many consumers are reevaluating their everyday and leisure spend. According the recently released interactive table from ONS (view), which illustrates the average spend per UK household for the 22/23 financial year. The majority of visitor destinations will sit in the category of ‘cinema, theatre and museums’ with a budget of £2.90 per week and digging deeper, we can see that ‘Museums, Zoological gardens, houses and gardens’ command 90p per week. 

Overall, the average UK family spends under £50 per annum visiting these visitor destinations. If this isn’t a stark call to action to ensure that we’re delivering and communicating maximum value for consumers with our destinations, then I don’t know what is.

Our advice to tourism businesses is to take a step back and look at your products and services, gain creators and pain relievers. Then match these with the gains, pains and jobs of customers. Details on this framework are readily available for free online from Strategyer.

This exercise is a great place to start, and could only take a couple of hours for your leadership team but do reach out to us if you want some help getting this right. 

Photo by Max Harlynking

Two - Diversify your income 

Working with positive impact brands in tourism, conservation and education, were seeing them investing in new ways to generate income. In fact, it’s difficult to look at any sector at the moment and not find examples of companies expanding their brands and offerings into new areas.

Your visitor destination is no different and we are urging clients to develop their thinking as to how their brand can be expanded to offer new products and services, especially to new audiences.

Areas of development include:

  • E-commerce and online shop sales
  • Higher value experiences
  • Expanding food and beverage into own brand products - Jam / Gin / Chocolate etc..
  • Crafting products out of old materials / stock
  • Community focussed fundraising
  • These are only a few examples, with many other areas available to develop.

    It is essential to invest in this area of innovation, as last year the average footfall was around 10% below 2019 levels. Resulting in lower income for many organisations. Unfortunately, I don’t think that this year is going to be any better. In fact, I feel that it is going to be worse, with our teams preparing to face a further 3-4% total drop in visitor number vs 2019 levels.

    Therefore, we are advising clients to proactively invest a healthy percentage of budget and resources into their revenue diversification strategies. By targeting an income from these activities to generate 10% or more of total revenue within 3 years from now, we are working to reduce our sectors dependency on income from footfall.

    Three - Be more than a Visitor Attraction  

    It may help to reframe how you see yourselves, beyond being a ‘Visitor Attraction’. This feels like a particularly old term, with it first being used about 50 years ago. Our offering and consumer expectations have become so much more than this now, and the term seems almost too simplistic and one dimensional.

    A visitor destination brings with it the implication that you offer much more beyond what people might initially expect. More than just a place to spend time for entertainment or recreation, this label suggests an elevated food and drink offering, an interesting place to go shopping or a programme of events that make no two visits the same.

    Many national and International tourists boards do this well, so take a look at how they communicate to with audiences around multiple offerings, and consider how you can emulate this.

    As an example, the food at The Eden Project cafe is fantastic. I’m lucky enough to live within an hour and I visit regularly with an annual pass. I also ensure that we visit over lunch time, because myself and my family enjoy the food so much. Eden also boasts a great gift shop, with the products feeling authentic and in line with their visitor experience, affording visitors the opportunity to extend the Eden experience to their homes.

    There are many other fantastic visitor destination shops. I usually visit The V and A London shop before Christmas each year for stocking fillers for the kids, or a present for someone that I want to appear more interesting to.

    Looking at the wider tourism sector, many hospitality businesses are also evolving and expanding to position themselves as visitor destinations. The gin at Boringdon Hall Hotel is one of the nicest I’ve tasted, and the whiskey from The Lakes Distillery is award-winning and integrates with their accommodation and attractions, creating complete visitor destinations.

    Once we begin to consider ourselves as visitor destinations, we can then go to work on developing our visitor brand more holistically. A visitor brand can indeed look to extend its touch points more effectively with online retail, and even community building activities. Take The Tank Museum, famously spotting an opportunity to become more than an attraction, and acknowledging that even as a visitor destination they are only reaching a small amount of their potential global audience. They have developed into a visitor brand, exporting their organisation internationally and diversifying their revenue. Even spending a few minutes on their Youtube channel, you can tell they are THE brand to engage with and world class around their subject manner.

    In summary, when you evolve beyond seeing yourself merely as a visitor attraction, you enable yourself to communicate in more depth, across your total consumer offering. Beyond this, growing into a visitor brand gives you the opportunity to reach consumers and generate income independent of visitor footfall.

    Photo by Joshua Tsu

    Summary 

    Part 2 is on its way in a few days.

    If you have any thoughts, comments or advice, please do share with me at anthony@navigate.agency and I will try to include them to share with our industry peers.

    Thanks,
    Ant

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