Ep.47 Visit West Food and Drink Forum

[00:03] Kelly Ballard: Hello and welcome to series four of the Visitor Elves podcast. Whether you’re a returning listener or tuning in for the first time, it is amazing to have you here. I hope your summer season was a good one.

From what I’ve been hearing, it’s been a mixed bag out there. I was seeing an unusually high level of discounting, which is obviously to counteract the fact that certain parts of the population have less disposable income at the moment. Whilst discounting definitely helps you get an injection of cash, we all know it’s not a long-term strategy, so make sure you’re building a strong brand. Guys in difficult times like these strong brands really connect with their audiences and those are less affected by difficult financial times. So how was business for you? I’d love to get to know you. So if we’re not connected on Instagram or LinkedIn, then please change that and let me know what you do, where you work and what your biggest challenges are at the moment. Perhaps we can get specialists in onto the podcast to talk about the issues you’re facing.

Anyway, I’m especially excited to start series four of the podcast as I have a new collaboration with Visit West, the Destination Management Organization responsible for Bristol, Bath, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire, and everywhere in between. They’ve got around 600 members and many don’t always have the time to attend their face-to-face member events, so we’re bringing the speakers from those events directly to your ears on the Visit to Elves podcast. As an aside, did you know that there are around 45,000 people working in the visitor economy in the Visit West region? That’s enormous, isn’t it?

In today’s episode I attended the Food and Drink Forum, which took place on Thursday the 18 September the Old Market Assembly in Old Market, Bristol.  I chatted directly with the five speakers on the podcast when they came off stage, and there are just so many ideas and opportunities for businesses across the industry, not just in food and drink.

Here’s a summary of who and what you will hear in this episode. I spoke to Eloise Baum, general manager, Bristol Food Network. She talked about the Bristol Good Food 2030 programme and its new sustainability guide for hospitality.

I spoke to Louisa Jackley Davis, senior partnership manager for Virgin Experience Days, talking about how gifting can help your business.

Jon Chamberlain, head of marketing at Visit West, was also there, providing insights on group dining opportunities with the travel trade for food and drink experiences.

Natalie Clayton from AA Media introduced the new Visitor Ready scheme, a free hospitality assessment tool.

Dan Newman, managing director of Hospitality Rewards talked about the UK’s first dedicated benefits platform for hospitality workers.

I hope you enjoy this format. Whilst it is great to listen to a podcast, it’s always better in person, so hopefully I’ll meet you face to face next time.

Welcome to the Visitor Elves podcast, where we unlock the secrets behind tourism, hospitality and unforgettable experiences.

From insider stories to practical tips that help you boost footfall ticket sales and bookings, we’ve got it all.

I’m your host, Kelly Ballard, broadcasting from the buzzing city of Bristol in the West of England, but with listeners tuning in from all across the globe.

Whilst our guests often come from this corner of the world, the insights we share are relevant no matter where you are. After the episode, make sure you head to the show notes for a quick summary to get the full transcript and links to all the businesses and resources we mention along the way to sit back, relax and enjoy. Enjoy.

So I’m here now with Dan, head of commercial for Visit West.

Dan, what’s the idea behind having a podcast alongside your events for members?

[04:00] Dan Mills: Okay, so, yeah, interestingly, we put out a survey to our members around a year ago to determine which membership benefits they see as being the most beneficial for them. And to my surprise, meetings, events and networking opportunities came right at the top of that list.

So we’ve put a real focus on having a series of events for our members throughout the year. Some of those sector specific, such as today for food and drink members. We have attraction forums, events for members that are looking to work with groups, and the travel trade employability forums, as well as kind of geographical, um, specific events for North Somerset and South Gloucestershire and our annual conference.

But with our having 600, just shy of 600 members, it’s quite hard to reach all of those for, uh, for the events. Um, certain members, based on, you know, uh, capacity or workloads or where they’re located, may not be able to make the events. For example, today we probably had around 50 of our food and drink members in attendance, but we’ve actually got over 170 food and drink members across the region.

So by having a podcast, summarizing all of the key points from today’s event will enable us to reach the members that weren’t able to make today’s event. Not all members are visual learners as well, and kind of fully appreciate. Some members may look through a PDF or a PowerPoint presentation, but actually being able to listen to a podcast on the way to or from work is a really good way ofengaging and summarising all of the points that have been run through at an event such as today’s Food and drink forum.

[05:45] Kelly Ballard: Excellent. So let’s go and join our speakers from today’s event.

[05:54] Heloise Balme: Hi, Kelly. I’m Heloise Balme and I’m the general manager at Bristol Food Network. Bristol Food Network is a network and we are there to support, inform and connect anyone in the city who has an interest in making the local food system more sustainable and fair and resilient.

[06:11] Kelly Ballard: Brilliant. How long has this organisation been going on for?

[06:14] Heloise Balme: We started as a very much grassroots organization, 1997, and then we’ve kind of been officially a CIC for about ten years now, so, yeah, quite a long time.

[06:25] Kelly Ballard: Fantastic. From the talk that you gave today, there were some really interesting things that you’re planning for this year and launching. So tell everyone about that.

[06:33] Heloise Balme: Sure. So the main program of work that we deliver at the moment is called Bristol Good Feed 2030, and that was started because of the urgent need to take more action to improve the local food system within this decade. So not just in relation to the climate and ecological emergency, but also huge public health emergency around obesity and access to good food, and also really the need to continue building a really resilient local economy to support local businesses. So we developed a plan of action of key things that need to happen in Bristols food system with about 50 partners, and now we’re working to implement that.

[07:17] Kelly Ballard: Fantastic. And you’re also launching a guide, is that right, to support hospitality businesses?

[07:22] Heloise Balme: We are, so we have six different themes to the Good Food 2030 work, and one of them is local food economy. And that’s really where we look at supporting local food and drink businesses to be more sustainable, but also to really help them thrive and prosper in the local economy.

And through talking to partners in hospitality, we realised that there was really an opportunity to provide them with a locally relevant guide on sustainability.

So it’s going to be an online guide. We’re having an in person launch event with lots of people coming in, speaking about the work that they’re doing on sustainability. It will cover sourcing. So looking at how to buy from brilliant local food and drink producers, how to reduce food waste and redistribute surplus, and all the complicated legislation that food businesses are now subject to around waste as well, there’ll be some stuff in there, around people. So how to really provide new opportunities and to a more diverse range of people in your hospitality business?

There’s some brilliant stuff in there on marketing, written by one of my team about how to really use sustainability to market the sort of USP’s of your business, but also just how to talk about sustainability in a really engaging way with your customers.

So yeah, we’re really excited to launch it and the event will hopefully be in October and all the details will be shared by Visit West. So everyone’s welcome to join.

[08:51] Kelly Ballard: Excellent. One last question, quick question. Can anyone join Bristol Food Network from outside of Bristol?

[08:55] Heloise Balme: We do really support businesses that are kind of very much in what we call the city region. So we do work with producers, food producers who are kind of based in the North Somerset kind of Baines area, South Gloucestershire. So it is predominantly designed to support stakeholders in that area. But obviously the guide will be online on our website, bristolgoodfood.org. so you know, anyone is welcome to have a look and pick up the tips from there.

[09:31] Kelly Ballard: Excellent. Thank you.

[09:32] Heloise Balme: You’re really welcome.

[09:37] Louisa Jackley-Davis: I’m Louisa Jackley Davis. I’m a senior partnership manager at Virgin Experience Days. Okay, so Virgin Experience Days is a gifting platform and we sell experiences as gifts.

So we work with multiple suppliers across the UK, from attractions, museums and tours, but with restaurants, bars, hotels, spa breaks, jumping out of a plane and hot oil balloon rides, all of these can be sold as gifts. So we work with multiple partners in the UK. We have a domestic audience, our customers are all over the place and we make sure that we offer them the best possible gifting experiences for those gifting occasions. We believe the best things in life aren’t always things. I won’t say no to a bunch of flowers and bottle of champagne. However, people are certainly moving down the gift experience route for offering your loved ones, your family or friends something a little bit different for those gifting occasions.

[10:30] Kelly Ballard: Yeah. And you shared some really interesting facts. Tell me about the market size.

[10:36] Louisa Jackley-Davis: Yeah, absolutely. So the UK experience gift market is actually estimated at 1 billion pounds and growing. So I was very much here today to make sure that the Visit West members are actually aware of that and making sure that if it’s a route that they’re not looking at at the moment, to get in touch, because we can actually open them up and actually put their products, their experiences in front of that audience.

There’s 1.4 million purchases every year across both Virgin experience days in the UK and also our sister company in the US, Virgin Experience Gifts. And around 63% of UK adults would actually now prefer to give an experience gift over a material gift, which is really exciting and a great opportunity for all the suppliers that are part of Visit West.

[11:16] Kelly Ballard: Absolutely. So in today’s conversation, you said that dining experiences were top of the list. But what other experiences do you offer?

[11:27] Louisa Jackley-Davis: So we can do anything from afternoon teas, adventure, jumping out of a plane as I already touched on zookeeper for the day, driving experiences, theatre shows, music events and festivals, days out on tours, spa and beauty. But again, coming back to food and drink, dining is absolutely our number one category where we sell numerous experiences including brunches, afternoon teas, two three course lunches and dinners, tasting menus and Sunday lunches, which are becoming more and more popular with our gifting audiences to cookery classes, cocktail making experiences, wine flights, distillery tours and vineyard tours, to name a few. These are really, really popular on our website and growing.

[12:10] Kelly Ballard: How does somebody get involved in this and how does it work for them?

[12:15] Louisa Jackley-Davis: Okay, so for our suppliers, we work with over 5000 experiences that I touched on already and we’re always keen to get new and exciting experiences on board. And the fact that we joined up with Visit West as a member, we’re really, really keen to grow the experiences that we have in this region as well.

So if anyone is interested in getting involved with us, even if it’s just for a chat, to understand the gifting market a little further, please do get in touch. I’m Louisa, I’m the senior partnership manager and we have a host of fantastic partnership managers all looking after particular categories to help support those suppliers. The process is very much about getting in touch, talking to us about what you already offer. If you have a set price offering, then that’s absolutely easy to get on board and we can package that up with a hotel stay, even local attraction to actually combo that experience to put that across multiple sections on the website. But we’re always looking to help curate new experiences as well so we can work with you to actually create some really exciting experiences that we know from our experiences that will sell to our audience.

[13:17] Kelly Ballard: Excellent. And you as Virgin big brand do a lot of marketing around that, don’t you? Absolutely.

[13:24] Louisa Jackley-Davis: With the marketing, we cover the majority of the marketing mix as you all be working with already, I’m sure with geo targeted emails, campaign emails, social media influencer activity, search engine marketing, brand activations, pr and editorial and affiliate and affinity touching back on pr and editorial, we get contacted by numerous big media titles. They’re always asking for the latest gifting ideas. So we can absolutely put your suppliers experiences directly in front of those titles as well.

[13:55] Kelly Ballard: Brilliant. Thanks for your time.

[13:57] Louisa Jackley-Davis: Thank you.

[14:01] Jon Chamberlain: I’m Jon Chamberlain, head of marketing for Visit West, today was specifically for the food and drink businesses, and that’s something that’s often overlooked in terms of working with the travel trade.

We talk about attractions, tours and where to stay a lot, but these people got to eat too. And as Dan said in his opening remarks, it’s a very valuable part of the visitor economy. So we should definitely make sure that the travel trade know as many as the fantastic food and drink businesses in our destinations as possible. And options for them having a group lunch or an experience, a behind the scenes tour, a brewery or a distillery, for example, and those are absolutely things that they need.

Otherwise there can be a temptation to have the same lunch every day on a twelve day tour, which can get a little bit boring and really doesn’t showcase the food and drink offering. Not only we have here in the region, but in the UK as a whole now.

[14:57] Kelly Ballard: You talked about the audience that are coming in who will ultimately benefit from this. In terms of overseas travellers, you gave some really interesting stats. Could you share those?

[15:07] Jon Chamberlain: Yes. So we know that for 2022, and annoyingly, 2023, figures are just on the horizon, but for 2022, around about 21% of the visitors into our region were international staying visitors, but that accounted for over 40% of the spend and 42% of the room nights.

So you can see how incredibly valuable these visitors are. And if they’re staying overnight, they’re going to eat three meals a day at least. So giving them as many options as possible, enabled to be booked beforehand rather than just walk around and turn up. This looks nice. Then booking either groups or individuals, couples, family groups, into some fantastic food and drink venues really showcases the destination as a whole. You know, places like we are today, the old market assembly, the wardrobe theatre out the back, that’s a fantastic experience, which you could stay at a hotel just down the road. Marriott is just down the road, but quite easily miss out here. Another way of delving deeper into a destination and giving it a better narrative and encouraging more people to stay longer.

[16:17] Kelly Ballard: So you talk through the process. For an organization like the Old Market Assembly, for example, the restaurant here, perhaps they aren’t working with you from a dining perspective. So you’ve got The Wardrobe theatre signed up, but not necessarily the Old Market Assembly. So how would they go about seeing if they’ve got the right product for you? You’ve got something on your website that people can go through, right?

[16:41] Jon Chamberlain: Yeah. There’s a platform called Travel Trade Ready, so you can just go on the Visit West website under business support. There’s a link there. It’s very quick, easy sign up and it just has 20 odd questions on their yes or no answers. Do you do this? Is this available? What do you think of that? And then it will come out, say whether you are ready to work with the travel trade or nothing. And if you’re not, it gives you examples of how you could be, what you could do to change some of your processes potentially in terms of invoicing and that sort of thing.

And then beyond that, lots of contacts within the travel industry that you can then email and say, hi, this is our restaurant, this is what we can do. Could you send us any groups? Could you send us some business? And they will get in contact.

And that’s where the relationship with the travel trade starts. And travel trade is all about relationships form that relationship. Do a good job with the first couple of bookings you get through, you’ll see repeat bookings on repeat bookings on repeat bookings.

And those can go into fill the quieter time. So we’re talking midweek lunches, for example. The travel trade is not going to expect you to host a group of 50 people on a busy Saturday night in November. But like I say, the visitors are coming, are going to eat three times a day and very often need to get in somewhere good, but quick. 45 minutes, two course lunch, go on to go and see in the next place.

So they’re looking for those options there. And there is a lack of knowledge within the industry of what’s there because put yourself in the shoes of a DMC buyer that’s based in London dealing with the whole of the UK. They’re not going to know every restaurant in every town and city around. So they just need some key ones that they can have with confidence. Send repeat business to.

[18:28] Kelly Ballard: So when you put a call out, can businesses help us with the dining experience? Because we’ve got a group of buyers coming in. You want people to step forward and say, yes, I can support you in that.

[18:39] Jon Chamberlain: Absolutely. It’s an appreciation that when we bring buyers on a familiarisation trip,  also called an educational nowadays as well, that when they come in they have a great time, but they experience what their clients would experience, the end result of that, it’s a real fantastic chance to showcase that business to those key people. And each one of those key people coming will deal with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, cancel the business every year. So it’s a real opportunity to showcase directly to the right people that are going to book you.

[19:12] Kelly Ballard: Great, thank you, John.

[19:14] Jon Chamberlain: Thank you.

[19:17] Natalie Clayton: My name is Natalie Clayton and I work for AA Media and I’m project and partnership lead for the Visitor Read scheme.

So AA Hotel and hospitality services is UK’s leading hospitality scheme provider. And recently, earlier this year, we introduced a new visitor ready scheme, which is a new free accreditation scheme for the hospitality sector. And it’s accessible to everybody in hospitality, whether you are a place to eat, stay or visit.

And it’s a digital accreditation, so you can just go online, visitorready.com and you can apply. It’s a baseline compliance accreditation. So as long as you’ve got all your mandatory documents in place, it shouldn’t take you longer than about 5-10 minutes to complete. And once we receive your application, our verification team will go through it, verify it, and you will then hopefully receive your accreditation badge.

[20:21] Kelly Ballard: Fantastic. So what benefits are there to businesses in tourism and hospitality for this having this accreditation?

[20:29] Speaker F: Well, it is backed by a reputable company, the AA, and Visit England, obviously ts free. You can use the accreditation badge across all your marketing channels. The idea is that it enables businesses to showcase their commitment to compliance so consumers can visit with confidence.

[20:50] Kelly Ballard: Sure. So is it like your star scheme? I guess you get this accreditation badge and that is something that is, it’s what’s to be expected of the best organisations in the UK, if you like, because everybody is at a standard. It’s not obviously the best, but they’re operating at a decent standard.

[21:07] Natalie Clayton: Yeah, 100%. So earlier this year, the AA and visit England redefined or modernized the schemes of. So they introduced this new entry level scheme which is visitor ready and this should be the minimum that businesses should adhere to. It is, you know, it covers all your standards, your industry standards, and what customers expect. The minimum requirements customers expect when they come visit your premise or your property and you have the opportunity to gain quality or further your offering to consumers after that. So you can build the levels per se. So you can either upgrade your visitor ready to visitor ready, which allows a page on our consumer site which is just another marketing tool for your business at a very low cost. You can choose to be quality assessed, you can go that route as well. But visitor ready is a baseline accreditation which all businesses in hospitality should sign up for.

[22:12] Kelly Ballard: Absolutely. Well, thanks for your time today.

[22:15] Natalie Clayton: Thank you.

[22:18] Dan Newman: Hi, my name is Dan and I own hospitality rewards. We’re the first employee benefits platform specifically for the hospitality sector. So about three years ago, my business partner and I were looking at the hospitality sector and what we saw was that it was really hard work for employees, typically low wage, tough conditions, and we wanted to find a way to make them feel more valued. So we took a look at staff benefits and what we noticed was that hospitality’s benefits were quite poor compared with other sectors. So we did some research. We talked to lots of hotels, pubs, bars and restaurants and said, look, what do you think your team would really use? And we launched hospitality rewards in June 2024, focusing on health and wellbeing, support and money saving things from shopping to going out to cinemas to gyms.

[23:26] Kelly Ballard: Fantastic. So how can people get involved?

[23:30] Dan Newman: So we have two products. So one product is a free product. So this is part of our sort of mission that if you work in hospitality, you should be able to walk into another hospitality venue, tell them you work in hospitality and get a perk, get a discount. So hospitality supporting hospitality. So what businesses can do is they can put a discount for their own venue on our app and in return, their staff will get free access to the hospitality venue. Discounts that we have. We currently have 1200 venues, so that’s one way they can get involved. In the second way is they can buy memberships for their staff and those memberships give access to all of the benefits on our app. So, like I said, access to counselling sessions, to support, to gym and cinema, discounts, cash back on their food, shopping, all sorts of great stuff. And there’s a cost of two to three pounds per employee per month for that. So it’s relatively low cost. But the idea is that it helps those businesses recruit and retain their staff.

[24:47] Kelly Ballard: That’s excellent, isn’t it? Excellent. Well, thank you very much for your time today. That’s really useful.

[24:52] Dan Newman: My pleasure.

[24:55] Kelly Ballard: Thanks so much for tuning into today’s episode. If you’ve got thoughts on what you’ve heard, I’d love to hear them. Come and hang out with us on Instagram and LinkedIn. Just search for visitor elves and join the conversation. Don’t forget, all the links to the businesses and guests we mentioned are right there in the show. Notes. If you found value in this episode, hit that subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever else you listen. And whilst you’re at it, please give us a review. It helps more people discover the show and benefit from what we share. Until next time, keep creating those unforgettable experiences.