THE city centre management company Cityco held one of their ‘City Conversations’ on Tuesday. The theme was business tourism.
Good news is that this year’s Labour Party conference at the end of September and the beginning of October will not involve a ‘ring of steel’, closed off roads, and security checks. Instead the life of the city will continue pretty much as usual.
Paul Simpson, Managing Director of Visit Manchester, revealed that tourism was worth £5.5bn to the Greater Manchester region and supported over 70, 000 jobs.
Business tourism is particularly valuable. Apparently corporate folk in Manchester for meetings, incentive, conference and events, spend three times as much as other visitors. Political conferences are worth £18-20m each time.
Good promotional work that gets results is the annual Manchester 'Live' event in London dragging together 300 conference bigwigs to chat about Manchester.
A pleasing figure is that conference business has shown a 43% growth since 2009 despite the struggling economy.
The city region has a £822m contribution from this sector, which also supports more than 20,000 jobs. Generally though, Manchester needs to work harder to bring international conferences and conventions to the city as these have a bigger impact in terms of reputation and putting direct cash into the city.
Angie Robinson, Chief Executive of Manchester Central (MC), said the exhibition complex in the city had hosted 116 events over the last year taking £7m in revenue and delivering a £66m contribution to the economy. It received over 380,000 visitors, and research has shown that for every pound spent by conference organisers, another £41 on average was spent elsewhere.
Despite this success Manchester trails behind other British cities, being the 79th most popular conference city in the world, Glasgow is 58th.
Robinson acknowledged there was work to be done especially with the growth of Liverpool as a major competitor in the North West, and Leeds, as a competitor over the Pennines.
Manchester it appears doesn’t have the same amounts of money in the pot to woo would-be suitors as Liverpool. Worryingly by 2015 our Merseyside neighbour will have a larger convention facility than Manchester.
There are other issues with the MC complex too.
Robinson is determined to make MC a bigger presence in the city. She wants to light the place better, animate the large square in front. Staff are being re-trained to ensure they welcome delegates, visitors and the curious with a big smile and a default mechanism of saying ‘yes’ rather than ‘no’. Public tours will also be introduced.
Good news is that this year’s Labour Party conference at the end of September and the beginning of October will not involve a ‘ring of steel’, closed off roads, and security checks. Instead the life of the city will continue pretty much as usual. There will be more fringe events at the conference than ever before.
Robinson conceded that the present MC website was ‘crap’. She acknowledged it needs to be improved as a matter of urgency.
Confidential thinks the same could be said for the over-designed Visit Manchester website - the main tourism portal - which is a barrier to people enjoying the city rather than an incentive to come and play in Manchester. For instance, presently on the homepage the 'Top 5 Buildings' are displayed, a painfully idiosyncratic and limited list, only one of which you can regularly access. It makes Manchester look immediately poor for the general tourist....and the business visitor wanting general information.
Still, all in all this City Conversation was a cautiously optimistic, but realistic, appraisal of business tourism in the region. The comments from Robinson in particular showed how there is still a need to push business tourists out to other attractions across the city, but it's welcome that our slice of the pie has increased over recent years.
