Orkney tourism businesses gather for annual conference

Orkney’s annual tourism conference takes place in Kirkwall’s Pickaquoy Centre today, with over 400 local businesses invited to attend the flagship event.

The focus of this year’s conference – organised by Orkney Tourism Group (OTG) – will be on tourism in the digital age, with keynote presentations by a number of top industry speakers.

Thursday’s event will also provide the backdrop for the launch of the 2016 Orkney tourism brochure. Fifty thousand copies of the brochure, which contains all the information needed to plan a trip to Orkney, will be distributed through the Visit Orkney website and at exhibitions and events nationally. It will also be stocked in visitor information centres throughout Scotland.

Open both to members of OTG and non-members, this week’s conference is being hailed as the ideal opportunity for those working in tourism to talk to others in the local industry and keep up to date with what’s happening in the marketplace.

Registration for the event – which is free to attend – gets underway at 10.00am. The conference closes at 4.00pm and is followed on Thursday evening by the annual OTG dinner.

Ann Marwick, director of OTG, said: “Our annual conference represents one of the few opportunities that everyone working in Orkney’s busy and incredibly diverse tourism industry has to come together, take stock of where we’re at and discuss how best to take the sector forward over the coming year.

“Our conference theme of tourism in the digital age sensibly reflects the rapidly changing marketplace in which we now operate. That marketplace is more competitive than ever, but technology also offers us some exciting opportunities to promote Orkney to a global audience. Economically, tourism has never been as important for Orkney as it is now, so it’s vital that we work together as an industry to ensure the message about our wonderful islands is spread as effectively as possible around the world.”