VisitBritain was named ‘’Best National Tourist Board’’ at the British Travel Awards 2010 last night.
Winners are chosen by consumers themselves along with the leading travel professionals in the UK.
The award went to VisitBritain ahead of the highly-regarded Visit Florida in second place and Tourism Australia who came third.
The awards are regarded as the largest arbiter of consumer opinion on the UK travel industry. They are seen as the ‘’Oscars’’ of the profession and those who win are widely regarded as the best in the business.
More than 220,000 consumers cast their votes electronically for the UK’s favourite travel companies and organisations in an awards process that ensured integrity and transparency by being verified by City auditors Deloitte LLP.
The awards were publicised, and consumers encouraged to vote, through the British Travel Awards media sponsors. These included the News International publications – The Times, Sunday Times, The Sun and News of the World – and also through the Global Radio Group stations such as LBC, Heart and Classic FM.
People were also encouraged to vote through bus poster campaigns with CBS Outdoor, and further publicity in partnership with RoughGuides, TripAdvisor and travel industry TravelMole.
The awards were handed out at a ceremony at Battersea Evolution in London, before an audience of more than 1,100 industry leaders.
Sandie Dawe, Chief Executive of VisitBritain said: ”I am thrilled on behalf of all our staff and travel partners . In the past 12 months we promoted ‘’Value Britain’’ on the back of a falling pound and signed a three-year extension to our promotional partnership with the Premier League. We overhauled our award-winning consumer website VisitBritain.com to deliver content tailored to each person who visits the site and made huge strides in social media. We were placed among the top 20 brands on Twitter, won a 5 out of 5 quality rating on Facebook, delivered 3 million videos on YouTube and 95 per cent of our website images are user-generated contributions from Flickr.
‘’And we created a clear and simple marketing strategy around three core themes – Classic Britain, Dynamic Britain and Luxury Britain – which puts us in a strong position, working with the tourism industry here and travel partners overseas to achieve a sustained uplift in tourism after the 2012 Games.’’
