How to present Arts, Culture, and Heritage to diverse visitors
Can you develop imaginative activities for our varied visitors from around the world? Northern Ireland’s tourism industry wants to work with cultural businesses who are passionate about visitors and have a strong consumer focus. This section will help you identify how your attraction or experience could be better for international visitors.
Welcoming diverse visitors
Visitors to Northern Ireland are diverse. A high-quality tourism experience, like a high-quality cultural experience, is accessible and inclusive. Northern Ireland’s tourism benefits from the skills of arts, culture and heritage professionals who create exciting experiences for people from varied backgrounds and with different interests.
How to communicate with international visitors contains advice on overcoming cultural and language barriers.
Our visitors have a range of reasons for engaging with culture and may well behave differently when they travel than when they are at home. A successful attraction or experience gives people choices so that as many people as possible can find something that resonates with them. There is no ‘one size fits all’.
To deliver excellent visitor experiences for all, it is vital that tourism businesses understand the opportunities and address the barriers and challenges of customers. This can help future-proof your business and lead to increased revenue, loyalty, demand and customer satisfaction.
Your experience should aim to be accessible to all people, regardless of their physical limitations, disabilities or age. Requirements to accessibility include cognitive, hearing, mobility and vision dimensions, but it also includes any person that needs to access places with ease, for example, parents with prams, as well as people with mobility needs.
For more information, see Embracing the Disability Discrimination Act
International Visitors to Northern Ireland
Tourism Ireland carries out regular, extensive research on who visits the island of Ireland as a holiday destination and why. They have identified three priority market segments of international visitors.
The Culturally Curious segment is the priority segment for the island of Ireland and will be the target audience for most cultural activities. Culturally Curious holidaymakers are interested in meeting the locals, exploring the place and broadening the mind. Social Energisers and Great Escapers segments will be attracted to some cultural experiences.
Visitors from the Republic of Ireland
Tourism Northern Ireland has also investigated the characteristics and motivations of visitors from the Republic of Ireland. The segments share many characteristics with the more general international segments. Read about them in our ROI Market Review.
The visitor segments for Great Britain and Northern Ireland domestic markets have also been reviewed. There are similarities with international segments so these visitors too will be motivated by experiences made with a focus on international customers.
How do we know what our visitors want?
Visitor feedback
The most obvious way to find out about your visitors is to talk to them. Learning directly from visitors is invaluable to any tourism business. The best providers know that there is always more to learn about how visitors react. They ask visitors direct questions and watch them closely to find out what they most enjoy and what could be improved. They are open-minded and creative in redesigning what they offer to increase their visitors’ enjoyment and minimise their frustration.
Monitoring how your target audience respond is essential. It takes time, constant attention and is a long-term project.
Tourism data and profiles
Existing data and insights (like those above) can help you understand potential new audiences. Tourism as an industry is good at collecting, analysing and disseminating valuable statistics. This data is an important resource for working out what you need to develop or change to attract these visitors to you.
Historic Royal Palaces - Hillsborough Castle and Gardens
Hillsborough Castle and Gardens has a lot to offer and many different types of visitors can find a good day out there. Local people enjoy family visit and church and community groups are frequent visitors who focus mainly on the gardens and tea and cakes. Providing for all these visitors is important.
Visitors from further afield, particularly from overseas, tend be Culturally Curious and wish to know more. They want to understand the stories of Hillsborough Castle and the people associated with it. They are interested to discover what the place is about, particularly in the context of Northern Ireland’s history. They tend to gravitate to the guided tours. The skills of the guides in matching the content of the tour to the interests of each group are vital. Around 13% of Hillsborough Castle’s visitors are north American. For them, the connections between Hillsborough Castle and the origin of the USA are particularly important.
Great Escapers visiting Hillsborough Castle and Gardens will usually be more interested in the social rather than political aspects, so tours for them focus on what it was like to live at Hillsborough and the people of the household. These tours are more interactive and contain more activities suitable for children and families.
Keeping this multi-faceted attraction enjoyable and relevant for its varied visitors requires constant monitoring. Hillsborough Castle’s success depends on listening to visitors. Guides collect feedback and act on it. Over time this has led to a loosening up of the tour content which visitors could find rather esoteric and academic. The team has learned not to assume they know what visitors think but to ask them, regularly.