Youth Travel Toolkit Section 7: Useful Resources and Contacts

This section offers a list of useful resources and contacts for businesses to develop their own youth travel strategy further.

1. Business Opportunities and Resources

Love Loch Lomond: offers business development opportunities, access to learning and training, promotional and networking events. 

Business Loch Lomond: free website resource offering business news, case studies, reports and insights, industry toolkits, blogs, downloadable information and more – register to access all. Users can also post jobs, news and events for free.

Glasgow Tourism and Visitor Plan: as Loch Lomond's near neighbour, the site provides a host of useful industry information, including business events, visitor insights, tools and updates.

Invest Glasgow: Invest Glasgow is Glasgow City Council’s inward investment team. Invest Glasgow offers comprehensive business support and guidance, providing one point of contact to all businesses, property investors and developers seeking to invest.

VisitScotland.Org: the B2B industry sit offers a wide range of business support and resources, toolkits, news and more.

VisitBritain.Org: the UK travel trade site, offering useful visitor intelligence reports, case studies, news and more.

Scottish Tourism Alliance: membership organisation supporting the tourism industry and providing regular networking opportunities. The STA also leads the facilitation, co-ordination, ongoing development and delivery of the National Strategy: Tourism Scotland 2020.

2. Innovation and Business Growth

Scottish Enterprise: Scottish Enterprise supports businesses to achieve their goals in several ways, from workplace innovation to advice on exporting, seminars and briefings, to funding and grants.

Interface: Based regionally throughout Scotland, Interface works with businesses of all sizes, in all sectors, including tourism, to match them to Scotland’s world-leading academic expertise to help them grow. Interface also helps groups of businesses to work together to tackle industry sector challenges leading to transformational outcomes and impacts.

The free and impartial service has helped hundreds of organisations to become more competitive enabling them to increase their profits, maximise their export potential and ultimately become more sustainable.

3. Digital Learning and Training

Digital Tourism Scotland: offers excellent digital learning and training workshops and courses for the tourism sector, as well as a range of web-based resources. Workshops are largely available via local tourism groups and destination organisations.

Business Gateway: offers a range of free learning and training opportunities across the the destination area, including Helensburgh, Clydebank and Glasgow. Support also includes Digital Boost, a programme where a business can be matched with a digital expert for a number of hours of support to focus on a particular areagoogl of assistance, for example, developing online booking, video or more. 

Google Digital Garage: great free online resource, helping businesses develop digital marketing, SEO, social media and more, often with physical workshop sessions available across the UK, including sessions and events in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

4. Youth Travel

Youth Travel Edinburgh: Youth Travel Edinburgh is currently the most active and engaged initiative in Scotland focusing on the youth travel market, given the city's strong appeal outside London, to youth travellers and international students. It has developed a range of resources for businesses with support from the Edinburgh Tourism Action Group (ETAG). In Summer 2018, Youth Travel Edinburgh launched a city-wide digital campaign, #UncoverEdinburgh, supported by the VisitScotland Growth Fund, ETAG and Marketing Edinburgh, to help drive more youth travellers to Edinburgh as part of the 2018 Year of Young People. Campaign content was co-created with young people in conjunction with social media influencers and a “Content hub” full of new, free-to-use digital resources was made available for businesses to use and join in the online conversation.

BETA UK: (British Educational Travel Association): Established in 2003 as a not for profit membership association and now represents some of the biggest and best-known businesses in the youth, student and educational travel industry.Since then it has pro-actively created a platform and network for businesses engaged within the sector, to meet, network and trade.  BETA’s role is to represent and co-ordinate the interests of this fast growing and dynamic industry.  

WYSETC.Org: WYSE Travel Confederation is the only global not-for-profit membership organisation representing the entire youth, student and educational travel industry. Its members are the leaders in youth travel. It is committed to understanding the ever-changing characteristics, motivations, and needs of young travellers. 

UNWTO: The World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) is the United Nations agency responsible for the promotion of responsible, sustainable and universally accessible tourism. The UNWTO promotes tourism as a driver of economic growth, inclusive development and environmental sustainability and offers leadership and support to the sector in advancing knowledge and tourism policies worldwide. Users can subscribe to newsletters and access a variety of reports, news and statistics.

Year of Young People 2018: The Scottish Government's Year of Young People 2018 is an opportunity for generations to come together and celebrate the nation’s young people. It is a platform for young people (8 to 26) to give them a stronger voice on issues which affect their lives, showcase their ideas and talents, and ultimately, aim to challenge status quo and create a more positive perception of them in society. In tourism, this has been developed in various ways across the country - check out the VisitScotland resources. 

Young Scot: Young Scot is the national youth information and citizenship charity. It provides young people, aged 11 - 26 with information, ideas and incentives to help them become confident, informed and active citizens. It does this in various formats, including online, social, apps, magazines, and phone, to enable young people to access information in ways which they are comfortable with.

5. Travel Resources & Communities

Skift: provides the latest on global travel industry intelligence: news, info, data and analysis on airlines, hotels, tourism, cruises, startups, tech and more. 

Digital Tourism Think Tank: offers lots of interesting articles on the use of technology from destinations around the world and hosts year-round events.

Expedia Research Insights: provides useful insight documents into different demographic groups of travellers, including youth travellers.

Travel Massive.com: global travel community with chapters in Scotland including Edinburgh and Glasgow - useful for networking, making connections on and offline, and attending industry events across the world.