IT's one of the most familiar signs across the globe, the italicised lower case 'i'. People have sought it out while trying to navigate, find tourist assistance or simply understand cities for two generations.
Tourist Information Centres are losing their prominence. They are becoming the point of last call for visitors
Over the same period tourism in Manchester has been transformed. The city is apparently now the the third most visited city in the UK behind London and Edinburgh, throughout this year we've had record-beaking hotel occupancies with lots more hotels planned, numerous events such as Manchester international Festival have dragged in visitors from across the globe, new attractions have helped grow tourism numbers exponentially.
Yet Manchester has not had a proper tourist information centre (TIC) since April.
Council cutbacks and the end of the lease in the award-winning if oddly futurist Manchester Visitor Information Centre (MVIC) on Portland Street caused the full service to be withdrawn - Manchester has, typically one might say, never used the name 'Tourist Information Centre' but gone its maverick own way with MVIC.
Instead for five months we've had a rump service on limited hours operating from the lobby corridor of the Mercure Hotel close to the former site.
Now at last a permanent location has been found.
"We'll be opening in mid-September," says Nick Brook-Sykes, Marketing Manchester's Director of Tourism. "We have workers on the site converting the Transport for Greater Manchester (TFGM) office in One Piccadilly Gardens to a shared facility between MVIC and TFGM."
It won't be anything like the same scale as the former MVIC though. There will be fewer staff, much less space and fewer souvenirs for sale.
One Piccadilly Gardens
The new site"Tourist Information Centres are losing their prominence," continues Brook-Sykes. "They are becoming the point of last call for visitors when everything else fails. The acquiring of knowledge about a place has moved on, people are using other means, especially digital, smart-phones and so on, to get it earlier when visiting cities. Our increased web presence has shown us this with visitors to the Visit Manchester site up by 144%.
"More telling has been the huge fall in walk-ins to MVIC. In the five years before closure annual numbers in the centre dropped 45% from 344,000 to 195,000."
Brook-Sykes' figures are compelling.
As he also points out sharing the site with TFGM makes sense in terms of knowledge provision as one of the more common visitor questions is how to move around the city. The new site will also remain a focus for the start of guided walks and for general tourist information. It should also be remembered that Manchester now has city hosts around the key retail areas with their distintive livery provided by Cityco's Business Improvement District (BID) team.
The reduced service will, of course, handily save the council money, which in straitened times is a bonus. Not that Brook-Sykes sees this as the real reason for the direction taken by the city.
"Times are changing in tourism, it would be wasteful of us not to acknowledge this," says Brook-Sykes. "We're aiming with the new MVIC to make tourist information provision more efficient, we're not trying to cut the service or avoid providing it."
Time will tell whether the new MVIC will be big enough to cope with what we all hope is more growth in the numbers of tourists to Manchester. Tourism is above all a visceral experience, a foot-to-pavement experience, a person to person experience, it is not primarily digital. Brook-Sykes is right to argue the case about the many different ways we access information in 2015, but let's hope the reduction in scale of the new MVIC doesn't harm that visceral experience.
Manchester Tour Group
