Great West Way awarded funding for Tourism Recovery Campaign to showcase the route’s cities and towns

By Peter Davison

11 April 2022

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Great West Way, the destination organisation working in partnership with 27 destinations to promote the multi-modal touring route between Bristol and London, has been awarded a share of the £1 million VisitEngland 2022 Escape The Everyday destination marketing fund, established to support post-pandemic tourism recovery in England.

The funding will be used to launch a national digital and social media marketing campaign promoting urban short breaks on the Great West Way this spring and early summer. Cities and towns including West London, Bristol, Bath, Reading, Salisbury, Windsor and Swindon, as well as a range of Great West Way ‘ambassadors’ - tourism partners and businesses from across the visitor economy - will feature in the Great West Way campaign.

David Andrews, chief executive at Great West Way, said, “We’re delighted to have been selected by VisitEngland to receive this funding. The campaign is an important support for tourism businesses who have been hard hit by the pandemic across the last two years and we are aiming to replicate the success of last year’s Great West Way Escape the Everyday campaign which generated an estimated £5m visitor spend in local economies across the route.

"We’ll be working closely with our town and city destinations to showcase the surprising, contemporary and high-quality urban experiences to be found along the Great West Way and encouraging visitors to explore these alongside our extraordinary heritage and countryside.”

VisitEngland director, Andrew Stokes, said: “VisitEngland is very pleased to be delivering this fund to support destinations locally as they align their activities to our national Escape the Everyday campaign, encouraging more people to discover the fantastic array of tourism products on their doorstep and further afield.

"The funding will support businesses along the Great West Way who have been working so hard to welcome visitors back and provide a stand-out experience.”

By Peter Davison

Peter Davison is deputy editor of The Business Magazine. He has spent his life in journalism – doing work experience in newsrooms in and around Bristol while still at school, and landing his first job on a local newspaper aged 19. By 28 he was the youngest newspaper editor in the country.

An early advocate of online news, he spent the first years of the 2000s telling his bosses that the internet posed both the biggest opportunity and greatest threat to the newspaper industry and the art of journalism. He was right on both counts.

Since 2006 he has enjoyed a career as a freelance journalist. He lives in rural Wiltshire with one wife, two children, and three cats.