Everyone at McKinlay Kidd was delighted that we have reached the finalists shortlist for the 2009 Scottish Thistle Awards - the Scottish Tourism Oscars – for “Operator Programme of the Year”.

(We were thrilled two years ago when we were not just finalists but won our category.)

The judges comments are particularly glowing:  ” (See Scotland differently) presents consumers with a clearly defined cornucopia of travel delights and the imagery used allows Scotland’s natural beauty and amazing built heritage to shine, enticing more visitors who are looking for what is unique and special about our stunning destination.”

Competition is tough so we wil just have to see what happens at the ceremony in October.

A question often asked of me, so here is some photographic evidence.

Not only did we enjoy some fabulous weather, but Heather and I also manage to find 20 dolphins, a deserted beach, a remote island (with its own bar) and great fresh seafood. Then on Monday, we took the ferry to the island of Arran for a night in the rather special hotel we feature there, had a wonderful dinner, stocked up on Arran Aromatics and cheese ( not in the same bag though), enjoyed lunch al fresco with a stunning seascape view, and  finally headed home.

Oh yes, here is the remote island where we spent most of Sunday.

All in all, that’s our idea of a perfect couple of days – well it s our 19th wedding anniversary too. Watch out for some new holiday ideas exploring Scotland’s best beaches very soon!

Probably the business person in travel I admire most is Noel Josephides, founder of the Sunvil travel group. He writes a regular article in Travel Bulletin, which is always worth a read. His most recent article compared various destinations in Europe and their relative appeal for repeat visits. His view was that, for example, Greece’s enduring popularity was at least part based on the welcome the locals gave to visitors, where you can often find yourself welcomed into homes and being made part of the family. In contrast a number of countries (he mentioned Croatia and Thailand) he felt offered a welcome that was not unfriendly but was from non-locals or staff who maybe had been well trained but did to have that genuine touch.
Well, I would agree with him for most parts of Greece (though not Crete from our last holiday there).
It made me think about one of the principles we work with when designing holidays and choosing accommodation. We have always looked for independent hotels, ideally with a resident proprietor. Another key factor is the relationship the hoteliers have the local community – I am always keen to hear that they have a local family connection, or if not , that they are passionate about where they are living, and have a genuine commitment to the area. Of course in remote parts of Scotland recruiting local staff can be impossible, but its always good to find a core of staff who are from the area, and are not just seasonal.
I know its a real danger sign if comments are made such as “none of the locals want to work here” or worse still “I try to keep the locals away as they will upset my guests”.
Yes the people do make a difference and Scotland’s long term tourism potential depends on offering a genuine and warm welcome to all.

Just back from a couple of days in the Cairngorms, where we were testing a new holiday – our Highland Wildlife experience. We had pretty good weather for the time of year and although it still quite early for lots of wildlife, we enjoyed some fabulous badger watching in the evening hide, and then had a memorable day out with our friends Sharon & Philip with guide Simon. What makes this holiday unique is that the two day trips are exclusive – you have the guide to yourselves so you can very much tailor the days to suit your own interests.

Our main aims on Saturday were three birds which are pretty unique to the Cairngorms – crested tits, Scottish crossbills and ptarmigan. We had reasonable success – on several walks we heard crossbills ( which Heather, influenced no doubt by our time in Africa, kept referring to as hornbills) but only saw evidence of their stripping of pine cones. After pursuing the sounds on two occasions we had a wonderful view of a pair of crested tits bobbing from tree to tree and occasionally displaying their crests.

Ptarmigan, an apparently very large turkey like bird, were not to be found – even the one which will on occasion display to passing traffic near a town was off chilling somewhere else.

Still it was also great to be outdoors surrounded by the glorious scenery of the national park. I also saw my first dipper, and our guide even spotted its nest, tucked up in the beams of a wooden road bridge, would you believe.

On Sunday, with the weather beginning to change, we decided to take the mountain railway up Cairngorm – which takes you to around 1100 metres. At the summit the wind was blowing at 60 mph, but there were still a reasonable number of hardy skiers out there. In the summer as a railway passenger you are restricted to the area immediately surrounding the station, to minimise the impact of thousands of walkers using the railway for ascent and walking down. Still it is a superb experience and well worth the trip. I remembered the last time I was there was in the early 1970s with my parents – great memories.

The last few months have been incredibly busy, as we prepared the new holiday programme for 2009.  We now offer more Scottish holiday ideas than ever, and more will be introduced over the next few weeks too. Then there was the design and development of the new design website, full of new features and with a radical new look. Thanks to Ben Ellis at hungrybrowser. ( Hope you like it!) Furthermore we decided it was time to make some major changes to our printed material, so a new brochure and accompanying brand piece was designed with the help of DR Creative in Edinburgh – thanks to Red & Paul.

I am delighted to say that it does seem to be paying off, with bookings in January off to a great start, despite the economic doom & gloom around.

Just when we were starting all this work my mother suffered a severe stroke, which she fought for just over a week, but which was in the end too much for her. She was “in her ninetieth year” as she used to say and had a great life.

You may be interested to read her obituary here.

She always took a great interest in the business and I am so sorry I won’t be able to show her our new brochure and website. My dad died nearly 5 years ago, just after we started McKinlay Kidd, but he too was really supportive in those first few months.

I was just thinking the other day, when I would have loved to phone home to tell Mum about our news and realised that I couldn’t: without them I would not be running a Scottish travel company. It was our annual family holidays to Scotland from the late 60s onwards which showed me this great country for the first time.

Just one thing I should have said thank you for.

Although I am a car and motor-racing enthusiast – and have been lucky enough to drive nearly all the classic cars we offer for hire – I also really enjoy a kind of liberation when part of a holiday involves no car travel at all.

This is a theme we will be developing further for 2009, with a number of new holiday options where you can “leave your car behind”, yet still be independent. Last month we had a fabulous weekend on exactly this basis. OK, we did drive to Oban (could have taken the train or a bus from Glasgow) but we parked up on the Friday afternoon and did not return to the car until Monday morning.

Our destination was the island of Colonsay, with a resident population of around 100, over two hours by ferry from Oban, and an hour from Islay, this is one of the more remote Hebridean islands. We have been there before but just as day trippers from Islay, so his time we were going to stay over. After sampling one of the island’s beers ( yes they do have a micro brewery! ) in the bar on the ferry to get us in the mood, we both felt a sense of adventure, of heading somewhere new and different. The arrival at Scalasaig (the “port” – well slipway) I was reminded of my Greek island-hopping past, when the arrival of the daily ferry was the big event, with, it seemed, most of the island down by the port, seeing who was coming and going, greeting friends and offering strangers rooms to rent. I was delighted even to see the manager of the hotel there with his 4WD to bring guests’ bags up the hill. Heather, mind you, decided we were fit enough to carry our own, so we waved to him and set off. Alright it was only about 5 minutes, but still..

So there we were, half an hour later, sitting down to dinner, feeling refreshed and excited about the weekend ahead, already picking up the special vibes of a remote island community, yet just a few hours after leaving the city lights of Glasgow.

We spent the next two days walking all over, exploring just a small number of the beaches – there is definitely one for every day of the week – getting soaked one day, and paddling on the sea the next, eating great food, enjoying a few local beers and generally chilling.

And the end result? Watch out for Colonsay featuring heavily in our 2009 holiday programme..

The autumn is probably the season when I spend most time away from the office touring Scotland, visiting the hotels and other business partners to discuss the past year and plans for the future, checking out some new options and formulating plans for the next year.

My first main trip this year was to Lewis, and a literally flying visit covering Stornoway and the west coast, plus a quick nip down to Harris. We will be increasing our accommodation options here for 2009, but not using any hotels. Every island is different in how it approaches tourism, and Lewis for me is remarkable as it is the guesthouse sector here which is leading the way – many of the hotels are very much focussed on corporate and groups business. There are now two 5 star guesthouses in the Stornoway area and we will be offering both of them. There are also several very good 4 star options too, which will be good reserves for us. I also enjoyed an excellent dinner in a restaurant in the centre of Stornoway – to a standard no other island town can manage. Although it was a Tuesday it was pretty busy, with some visitors, some business people and a marked number of younger locals, clearly home for a visit from the mainland – taking mum and/or dad out for a special meal. For me personally it was great to see that when someone with some talent puts their mind to it they can run a successful (this place as been going for several years) high quality restaurant in a small Scottish town – and this is not the only example in Stornoway apparently. Quite why other towns of a similar size can’t manage it is pretty frustrating  – there are a few in the west coast which are almost deserts when it come to good food.

While on Lewis I made sure to pop in to the Callanish (or Calanais) standing stones – one of my favourite spots in Scotland. Just like the Ring of Brodgar on Orkney the site is free to access – a perfect spot to catch sunset, or sunrise if you prefer and somewhere to visit more than once while you are on Lewis. I know there is a visitor centre/cafe (unlike at Brodgar), but is hidden from view from the circle itself and does some great home made soup.

Next morning before my appointments restarted I made sure to add another beach to my “collection” – I am ashamed to say I used to think Lewis did not “do” beaches, but am pleased to have changed my mind now. The beach at Tolsta was a fabulous place, approached over sand dunes so its full extent is only gradually  revealled to you -a wide sweep of sand, a couple of great headlands and views across to the Summer Isles and the mainland. Oh, of course my other favourite feature of a great Scottish beach – I had it all to myself.

By that afternoon I was in Harris, enjoying Donnie’s perfect Cullen skink at the hotel we have worked with for several years, and catching up with Dena. Just before returning to the airport Dena took me to an amazing place- the Seallam heritage centre, an absolute must visit in the islands, especially if you have an interest in family history. They have records of every family who lived in the Outer Hebrides, and rather than you tracing your ancestors, it’s about finding where you fit in with the records they have. These are built not just from the written official records but augmented by local records, even oral history. Even if you don’t have an islander in your past, the exhibition areas were excellent, with a particularly comprehensive section on St Kilda. Now there’s somewhere I must go.

Regular readers of this blog will, perhaps, have been frustrated that it has not been updated recently.

A wee systems issue prevented this for a while, but we are now back on track.

Over the past few months I have been lucky enough to have been out and about quite a bit in various parts of Scotland, finding new holiday options and checking up on current ones.

We spent Easter weekend on one of my favourite islands – Gigha, a small island off Kintyre. We manged to walk a fair bit and even enjoyed sunshine, in between snow showers. Still, it was March.

In April we took a group of classic car drivers to Ardnamurchan – the most westerly point of mainland Britain – and then on to Mull. During our stay we drove right around the island and crossed to Iona – another of my favourite tiny Scottish islands. The weather was fabulous- as is usually the case for this group, and the evening delights of Tobermory were much enjoyed.

Later that month it was up to Sutherland, and the northwest highlands with some Dutch friends.

We had a glorious drive north on the Sunday, reminding me once again the contrasts of this country, leaving Glasgow at 11, passing through the highlands, with lunch north of Pitlochry and afternoon tea beside the Cromarty firth. Then finally to the remarkable emptiness of Sutherland.

To complete our trip we had a fabulous trip with Ian – the creel fisherman whose trip is included in our new Scottish Seafood Trail. Lunch from the catch – prepared by Jess – was the largest “heap” of langoustine and squat lobsters I have ever seen. Remarkably, we ate every one!

In between times I have been checking out new options in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perthshire and Argyll.

Now we are into the peak booking season there is less time to leave the office, but by August I hope to be back on the road, with my list filling up already.

Our new brochure has arrived from the printer and will be mailed to our database over the next couple of weeks. Although we didn’t change the basic layout, we did make a large number of small changes to improve its usability. The main change was the front cover picture, as ever year.
During our October trip to Barra, we had a couple of hours before our return flight and as it was sunny day we decided to find a new beach to explore. We ended up at Traigh Eais, which is in fact the beach across the road from the airport – though not the one the planes land on.

As we walked over the dunes and the sun chased the clouds away, we both realised that this would be an ideal place to try to take some website pictures and even to experiment for some front cover options. We had already pretty much decided what look we wanted and for the next 30 minutes set about trying to work out some angles from the dunes, with plenty of beach, blue sea and the headland in the background. Each of us in turn headed onto the sand to try giving the enormous sweep some perspective, though as it was October we were both wearing big coats and that idea was soon shelved. Still we worked away, took over 100 pictures and were confident that there would be a good candidate in the bag. The sun was shining, the sea had just enough waves and the clouds were fluffy
Taking a break we walked together down the dunes and along the beach to our left. In a few minutes we came across a large tree trunk, neatly sawn off around 3 metres from the base, lying on its side. Heather walked up to it to take a look. “Stop”, I said, ” I want to take a picture”. From my angle the tree had an interesting angle and had a mysterious look. How had it got there, where was it from, why was it cut at such a height? How long will it stay? Anyway Heather retreated, leaving a few small footprints in the previous pristine sand. I took 3 shots. “That could be quite fun for the website, or as a screensaver, I said. We walked on. After climbing the dunes again we took another 30 pictures in the other direction, from the dunes, but the light was not so good and we headed to the aiport and for Glagsow.

We sat down in early January to choose the front cover picture. I did a shortlist exercise reducing our library to 10. As I was browsing I threw in one of the tree trunk just so we could enjoy it again. Of course, when we looked at the selection together, it was perfect – definitely See Scotland differently.

My only regret is that you can still see Heather’s footprints on the sand!

My thoughts turned to Trip Advisor this week when they announced their TOP HOTELS list for 2007 and Scotland’s sole representation in any ratings was one Edinburgh B&B. That got me ranting – for a while anyway. I know we work with fantastic hotels offering great experiences and value for money – where were they? As I look at the list I see numerous luxury hotels in glamorous places, often very sunny climates, charging hundreds of pounds per night. A level playing field?

Don’t get me wrong – Trip Advisor has been one of my reference points for researching new hotels and areas since we started, and makes a valuable addition to travel planning, for consumers and professional alike. I do, however, take much of what is written with a pinch of salt – after all its just subjective opinions, which are often contradictory. I know that changes in key personnel, chefs, managers and of course owners can change a hotel completely. Trip Advisor takes no account of these. Many of the hotels I know personally there still have reviews from 5 years ago when previous management was in place. That these historic reviews stay live can be unfair and of course misleading – in either a negative or positive way. Of course, like any research tool you also have to read between the lines on the reviews themselves. Happy to say, that increasingly you will see a comment starting off “Contrary to the other reviews on this site, I etc etc” so many of us want to make up our own minds.
So, while TA is one of my early research sources and one I keep referring to during the year – I certainly rely on my own judgement when choosing a hotel to work with, through direct experience and then listening to what our customers say during the year – after making sure we present the hotel to the most suitable audience. Based on what our customers tell us, we do (nearly always) get it right.