Scotland

The Outer Hebrides have been a popular destination for tourist since before the tourism industry began with places such as St. Kilda being of great interest to travelers, explorers and anthropologists. It would seem that the interest in St Kilda has continued to grow since it was evacuated in secrecy at the beginning of the twentieth century. More recently other aspects of the Hebrides, such as the spectacular scenery, the breathtaking beaches and the splendid archaeological sites, have caused an upsurge in interest once again and the demands upon Hebrides accommodation have never been higher.

Tourism has, for a great many years, played a vital role in the Scottish economy and the Scottish Government works hard to ensure it’s continued growth. A good few years ago the official tourism bodies in Scotland went through some major changes and much of the responsibilities of the Scottish Tourist Board were transferred to a company called Visit Scotland.  Heavily funded by the state Visit Scotland works to promote Scotland across the globe and there has been massive investment in their online presence in VisitScotland.com. While you may think that selling the Hebrides would be an easy task it would appear that the Visit Scotland sites (including the Visit Hebrides site) are failing in their responsibility to provide Scottish and Hebrides accommodation. Many owners of hotels and guest houses across Scotland have grown rather annoyed at Visit Scotland’s failure to supply them with customers (which I assume is their main task?). So much so that nearly all accommodation suppliers now have their own web sites competing against each other for the top places on the search engines.

Visitors to the Hebrides, wishing to book their hotel, guest house, bed and breakfast or self catering accommodation, face the daunting task of wading through countless web sites in the search for something suitable. Surely it would make more sense to just go to one web site where all Hebrides accommodation is listed? Well, yes and this has been the responsibility of Visit Scotland and Visit Hebrides but they have failed terribly. On the 22nd of February 2008 Visit Scotland made a public statement to explain that, in the coming months, they will work to refocus their sites to have an emphasis on the provision of accommodation. While this would be exactly what many suppliers have been crying out for, for the last few year, many feel that it is too little too late. Their justification in believing this is the fact that nearly all Hebrides accommodation related searches made on virtually all search engines fail to show Official sites in the first few pages of returns. Instead a multitude of single establishment sites and massive accommodation directories have swamped the returns.

Organizations, such as Enjoy Hebrides, are attempting to create sites which are simple and easy to use. Enjoy Hebrides hopes to be able to act as a gateway to all of the individual Hebrides accommodation providers directly by listing all properties on the one site. While this has been attempted before Enjoy Hebrides have a few advantages over the other similar sites. Amongst their team are Internet entrepreneurs who have had vast experience in gaining high placements on the search engines since the Internet really began. Furthermore the site will be supported by such sites as the Virtual Hebrides which is a long standing site that focuses heavily upon the provision of information about the Hebrides such as some amazing stories from the island’s eventful history and a most interesting gallery of old photographs (found in the Scalpay section). While Enjoy Hebrides is a tiny site by comparison their aims are truly massive!