Tourists – who needs ’em? Ummmm…. maybe we do

At last night’s (Monday 24 June) meeting of the full Town Council Councillors voted to ‘sort of’ row back on their decision to ‘save money’ and pull out of the ‘Great West Way’ tourist initiative, pioneered by the ‘Visit Wiltshire’ team.

The decision to pull out was taken a while back, in ‘secret’ as all reporters and members of the public were excluded from that part of the meeting and was reported by Marborough.news in February of this year.

Why / how ‘sort of’ row back on that decision? The decision was not to go back (immediately?) to the same level as before. That was full membership, described as ‘Destination Ambassador’, where all the benefits associated with the initiative are there for the town to access and use, but the lesser status of ‘Gateway Ambassador’, a level created for smaller parishes, with minimal budgets, that could then be identified on maps.

Does this new ‘small parish’ membership mean that Marlborough’s name can still appear on a Great West Way map? Yes, although references to our town will be consistent with those to such smaller parishes, such as Box or Steeple Aston, rather than Devizes, Chippenham or Newbury. And then what Marlborough can do with its membership will be at a different level as befits the investment.

Last night the Council was reluctant to commit to restore to the same level as the other main towns on the Great West Way. Possibly such a reversal would imply that a wrong decision had been made? But words and phrases were being bandied around in the discussion such as ‘lacklustre’, ‘value for money’, ‘what do we get?’, all of which pushed the eventual proposal to be one of a more cautious outcome.

But why? The Great West Way initiative started just before Covid. Tourism died then. And we have only – relatively recently – been emerging from that period and the economies of here and much of the rest of the world are still trying to heal those scars. So can this period be used as an effective judgment phase for a brand new tourism initiative such as ‘Great West Way’?

Also, how did Marlborough use it’s membership and investment? There is a three word mention (linked) in the ‘Visit Marlborough’ page of the Town Council website. Elsewhere, Hungerford, Chippenham for example, announce their position as towns in the Great West Way on their main road entry signs to the towns. The Great West Way linked logo appears prominently on the home pages of the Chippenham and Calne town websites.

Marlborough might regard the Great West Way initiative as being of questionable value, and ask ‘what do we get?’, but has the town embraced membership and used it? For you the reader to decide. But membership of any such club isn’t normally about what it does for you as a member, but what you do now that the door is open to what it offers.

A very ‘British’ example is membership of the MCC: exclusive, definitely. Difficult to get – very. But once in, members will ‘wear the tie’, talk about ‘going to Lords’, and make good use of being associated with the club, as well as – of course – popping in to the Long Room now and again. The MCC doesn’t shower them with gifts. Value of any such membership is down largely to the member and how they use it, so the question – ‘what do we get?’ may not be the most apposite when considering such membership.

Next stage? possibly for the management of Great West Way and ‘Visit Wiltshire’ to meet with the Town Council to discuss how the membership – at whatever level – can be employed to the most effective benefit of Marlborough, its traders and residents.