Celebrating English Tourism
Especially in current circumstances, it is more important than ever to support the UK tourism and leisure industry. As we face a period of downtime, that doesn’t mean you can’t celebrate the holiday and caravan parks that we love.
At Hanley Caravans our blog looks into celebrating English Tourism Week 2020 (25 – 31 May 2020) and how we can help parks facing difficulty at the moment.
Why Do We Have a Tourism Week?
Every year ETW or English Tourism Week is celebrated with week-long celebrations focusing on the tourism and leisure industry. It was started to help showcase the vibrant aspects of our holiday locations around the country and encourage more people to support local and regional businesses.
Overall, the visitor industry in England is worth a huge £106 billion each year alone and supports 2.6 million jobs. This provides a large amount of money for our economy and is important for employment and job creation.
Using the Virtual World
Normally we’d all be out visiting our holiday homes over the May Bank Holiday weekends. However, this year everything has changed and is completely different. We are facing a temporary different life and focusing on social distancing, keeping those we love around us safe.
Although, all is not lost for the industry! VisitEngland, who is responsible for English Tourism Week, came up with an alternative plan. They made the announcement that all the celebrations would be going virtual and online. The organisers asked MPs to take the time to record messages to encourage support for the sector.
Nigel Huddleston, Tourism Minister, said:
“English Tourism Week recognises the important role the industry plays in our local, regional and national economies, supporting jobs and attracting investment. This is a challenging time for the industry and we’re providing support through an unprecedented government package for businesses and workers. I hope everyone will use English Tourism Week as an opportunity to celebrate the sector, and we’ll be encouraging people to book a great British holiday as soon as it is safe to do.”
Adding to this, the Director of VisitEngland Andrew Stokes also said:
“English Tourism Week is all about highlighting the economic benefits that tourism brings to local economies, celebrating our diverse and exciting sector, and showcasing the quality, range and value of English tourism.
“While we cannot run events as usual this year, the spirit of the week has never been more important. Tourism has been one of the first and hardest hit economic sectors due to the Covid-19 pandemic and this year’s virtual week is dedicated to showing support for the industry, the millions of people who work in it and the hundreds of thousands of businesses impacted.
“It is also about looking towards the future recovery and doing everything we can right now to ensure that tourism can bounce back to once again become one of the most successful and vibrant sectors of the economy.”
What Can You Do?
The best thing to do is get involved! Whether you’re on your sofa, sat in bed or outside in your garden, no matter where you are you can get involved. Take a look at what your favourite caravan parks are doing and get involved with hashtags and social media posts.
Sharing photos of your holiday homes and memories is also a great idea too.
VisitEngland themselves are running a social media campaign called ‘I Support English Tourism’. They’re asking you to take a selfie or short video and post it on Twitter with the hashtag #EnglishTourismWeek20. On Thursday 28 May they will also be using the #ThrowbackThursday hashtag to share images of holidays around England.
For more about our holiday homes or parks in Lancashire, Cumbria and the North East of England, feel free to contact us.