A Vital Partnership: How Arts, Culture and Heritage can work with Tourism

Moving into tourism can be highly beneficial for the right cultural businesses.

The diversity and vibrancy of Northern Ireland’s culture make it a place that people want to visit and remember long after they return home. Modern visitors seek experiences that bring local culture to life; they are no longer satisfied with simply reading or hearing about it.

Harnessing Our Creative Spirit

Our arts, culture and heritage sector is key to showing our visitors who we are and where we come from. The arts and creative industries surround us with inspiration – music in the air, dancing in our feet, visual art on walls, in galleries and in studios. Our great writers convey our passions, past and present, on the page, the stage and the screen. We want our visitors to be a part of all that.

Frankie Creith - Making Your Mark on the Causeway Coast

Local artist, Frankie Creith unlocks landscape painting by taking visitors on a walk around Portrush with an artist’s eye. Back at the studio, she helps them translate what they saw into an artwork that they can take way as an enduring memory of the Causeway Coast.

A Giant Inheritance

Our castles, our cathedrals, our shipyards and our studios, our collections of objects and artefacts are not empty memorials to the past. They are a vibrant resource that, in the hands of committed communicators, give a tangible, authentic connection to our important stories – the stories that we know our visitors want to hear.

Belfast Mic Tours – Lagan Legends

This Belfast Mic Tours is a harbour walk that tells the story of the ‘Yardmen’ who built some of the finest ships in the world, including the Titanic. Their lives are made vivid, social and sensory, for instance, by visitors playing one of their games using coins of the period.

What tourism can do for your business …

• Bring you more, and higher-paying, customers.
• Support sustainable growth of your business.
• Increase your reputation, locally, nationally and even internationally.
• Enhance and extend your network, creating new potential partnerships and initiatives.
• Increase the enjoyment and personal rewards of working in your business.

… and what your business can do for tourism.

• Increase visitors’ opportunities to experience the character of Northern Ireland.
• Give opportunities for participation (much more than just listening or looking).
• Encourage creative responses and reflection.
• Create motivational experiences that will attract new visitors to Northern Ireland.
• Give visitors worthwhile things to do in evenings and outside the peak season.
• Offer original souvenirs with personal meaning.

Great Arts, Culture and Heritage Experiences for International Visitors

The experiences that will succeed with visitors to Northern Ireland, and that Tourism Northern Ireland wish to support, will have the following features:

• Innovative. We want experiences that people cannot do anywhere else. Ideally, that is nowhere else on the planet, but you may need to begin with being unique on the island of Ireland, in the UK or in Europe.
• Distinctly Northern Irish. The experiences should show something authentic about Northern Ireland, past or present - or may be even future. Meeting local people who enjoy talking about your story is often a core part of this element.
• Active and Participatory. Experiences should involve more than simply looking, reading or listening. They should involve visitors in conversation or activities.
• Surprising. The best experiences deliver more than people expect. They are out of the ordinary and leave lasting memories.
• Sustainable. Modern visitors want to know about the impact their travel is having on the environment. Many like to know they are contributing positively to the local area or community.
• Local and Personal. Experiences should showcase the local area and local people. They should have a strong personal element that makes an impact on participants.
• Open and Available. We need experiences that can run outside the peak season, on most days of the week, including weekends and ideally in evenings.
• Viable. The offer must make commercial sense and pay its way. It should be a bookable experience, ideally for a group of 12-20 people.

Guided Walking Tours -The Emigrants Walk

During The Emigrants Walk, visitors walk in the footsteps of the emigrants leaving famine-stricken Ireland through the Sperrins, with local expert Cathy O'Neill. They place their own stone on the 'carn' and experience what emigrants felt as they left their homeland. The experience continues at Friel's Bar & Restaurant, where visitors see the original famine pot and taste the nettle soup that would have been served to the villagers daily.

Seedhead Arts - Street Arts Walking Tour

Seedhead Arts provide a walk around Belfast’s Cathedral Quarter with street art experts and advocates gives visitors a chance to experience the contemporary culture of the city through the ever -changing face of Belfast street art. It is a vibrant and colourful visual way into the passions of the place and its people.