The Tourism Development Manager, Quentin Buller to give an oral report on tourist related business in the District.
Minutes:
The Chairman introduced the new Tourism Development Manager for Visit Epping Forest, Quentin Buller and welcomed him to the meeting.
The Tourism Development Manager advised the Cabinet Committee that he had been in the post since November 2014 and had a few projects underway.
(1) Database
Mr Buller advised that he had put a database together, in order to scope the kind of businesses in the district which were tourism and visitor related. There were approximately 150 businesses on the database and all of their email addresses had been captured in order to build up a communication channel and keep them updated as to what was going on in the District.
(2) Tourism Conference
A Tourism Conference had been organised for the 20 March 2015 which would be hosted by the Marriott Hotel in Waltham Abbey. The idea behind the conference was to get as many businesses together from the district and advise them of events that were happening in the district and to get networking going with each other and the various guest speakers that would be attending.
(3) Jazz Festival
The National Jazz Archives were held in the Library in Loughton and we were looking into the possibility of holding a Jazz Festival in the district at the end of this year. Looking at other Jazz Festivals that took place in the country, there was nothing held near to the Epping Forest District. This was an exciting prospect and it was hoped that it would grow in the future.
(4) Food Fayre
The Marriott Hotel, Waltham Abbey have been in contact and advised that they would like to hold a Food Fair in July 2015, to promote local foods in the District. They would like to arrange the Food Fair in conjunction with the Tourism Group and use our contacts with local businesses to promote the Fair.
(5) Website
The Tourism website, visiteppingforest.org, was under constant development and the number of people visiting the website was growing. The most popular page on the website was the What’s On page which was created in conjunction with the Waltham Abbey Tourist Information Centre. There had been many requests from people asking to list their events on our What’s On page.
A member’s part of the website had now been created where the gathered information would go out to the membership. Another job of the Tourism Conference was to widen the membership and acquire people and businesses to sign up to the group. The core groups were:
· Epping Ongar Railways
· Lea Valley Parks
· Royal Gunpowder Mills
· The Corporation of London
· Waltham Abbey
Visit Essex carried out a survey and the data, which was important to the local district, would be published on the website. We would be launching our own survey shortly to local businesses, this would be along the same lines as the Visit Essex survey.
(6) Visit Essex
A mapping exercise was being carried out of all the hotel rooms in the district to get a view of the available accommodation. It was noted that the district were strong on the day visitors but seemed to be weak on the overnight stays due to the lack of hotel accommodation in the district.
The Council need to build stronger links with outside organisations especially Visit Essex, we were members of Visit Essex and our district had a very high number of members of that organisation.
Today a tour of the District took place with Councillor Boyce, Chairman of Epping Forest District Council and George Kieffer, Chairman of Visit Essex. All of the major tour locations were visited and hopefully this had given Mr Kieffer a much better picture of what goes on in the Epping Forest District.
North Weald Airfield
Councillor Stallan stated that it was this Council’s wish to retain aviation at North Weald and also increase revenue by holding events at the airfield. He asked Mr Buller if he was intending to promote North Weald and recruit organisations into holding events at the airfield.
Mr Buller advised that he had visited the airfield and thought it was an attractive destination with plenty of space to hold events. He stated North Weald would be a good destination to hold the Jazz Festival and he would contact the Airfield in the near future.