Why Scotland�s missing the bus on eco-tourism
SPECIAL REPORT BY PETER JOHN MEIKLEM

TOP restaurateur Shirley Spear can't talk for long about the impact "inadequate" public transport links are having on her business - she has to head off on a 50-mile car journey to pick up a trainee chef.

The co-owner of Skye's The Three Chimneys - widely regarded as one of Scotland's finest restaurants - Spear knows transport links on the island are so poor that if she wants the new chef to try his hand in her famous kitchen, then there is no alternative but to give him a birl in her Audi estate.

If she asked him to get the bus, the trainee may have had to wait a very long time. In fact, he would have had to wait for the morning school bus, but bunking down in the heather around Portree is hardly the ideal preparation for a job trial.

This situation in one of Scotland's top tourist draws outside of the central belt is just one example of the problems that industry body the Scottish Tourism Forum has warned will "wither" the industry unless more is done, and quickly.

According to recent research by VisitScotland, 40% of visitors now consider environmental impact when organising their holiday. The number of visitors actually using buses in Scotland has grown too - from 31% in 2005 to 38% last year.

With petrol prices continuing to soar, and the credit crunch giving would-be tourists all the excuses they need to stay at home, a meeting of many of the industry's key players last week warned that much of rural Scotland is "cut off" from the rest of the UK by the poor quality of the transport links.

Although the state and size of some of Scotland's main roads - such as the A75, the A9 and the A82 among others - is also considered a major impediment to growth, the public transport question is fast rising up the tourism industry's agenda.

Chris Harvie, the SNP MSP, says the Scottish parliament's economy, energy and tourism committee - of which he is a member - is looking at the issue with increasing urgency. The committee is due to report on the prospects for growth in the tourism industry in July and Harvie says concrete recommendations on improving public transport links for businesses will be made.

The government-funded tourism marketing body VisitScotland may still have "aspirations" that tourism spend will grow by 50% by 2015, but small operators across Scotland believe the chances of hitting that ambitious target are being undercut by the difficulty of getting around Scotland without a car.

Says Spear: "We are seeing an increased number of enquiries from people who want to get here without a car. They want to travel but they still want to be eco-friendly. We are sorely lacking in any kind of public transport to meet their needs."

Next year, the SNP government launches the Homecoming Scotland 2009. Ostensibly a celebration of the 250th birthday of Scotland's national poet Robert Burns, the homecoming is being used to market Scotland across the world, in the hope of harvesting a bumper year for the tourism trade. Spear, among others, feels the transport problem could mean the year of the homecoming stays stuck in the starting blocks.

"The new government has taken tourism on board in a big way. However, there is still a lot of work to be done. If we don't start planning and thinking ahead now we are going to be left behind like we have been so many times in the past."

Skye is by no means the only part of Scotland to suffer from the problem; all of the nation's outlying visitor-draws are suffering to a greater or lesser degree: the rest of the Highlands and Islands, Dumfries and the southwest, the Borders, the East Neuk of Fife, among others, can all slip off the traveller's itinerary once they have considered the labyrinthine network of bus times and connections required to get anywhere.

For Harvie, the crucial question is not the quantity or quality of the services - although he admits those are also serious areas of concern - but the co-ordination between various services.

He believes that a national co-ordinator should be appointed to promote a more joined-up approach from Scotland's public transport operators. A rural transport tsar - although Harvie disdains that shopworn word - who can "speak tactfully but with a big stick to encourage operators to work more closely together to make services join up", is number one on his wish list.

Tourism attractions in the central belt do not have to face the same public transport challenges. Spear says she is sometimes "aghast" at the "vast sums of money" spent on improving the travel infrastructure between Scotland's two biggest cities. To rub a little more salt in the wounds, City of Edinburgh Council, Glasgow City Council and Scottish Enterprise last week announced an extra £300,000 of funding to attract more tourism and to improve transport links between the two cities.

Called the Edinburgh-Glasgow collaboration initiative, the money will be spent on improving all sorts of connections between the two cities, allowing them to be increasingly viewed - a spokeswoman for the project says - as "one shared economic space".

Add to that the guts of the SNP'S current plans to improve central belt travel infrastructure - promising to spend £1 billion on Edinburgh trams, electrification of the Glasgow-Edinburgh rail line, completion of the Airdrie-Bathgate line, finishing the M74 and new plans to extend the M8 to full motorway - and you have a national picture that rankles with small operators from Scotland's hinterlands.

Alan Keith, chairman of the Association of Dumfries and Galloway Accommodation Providers, says tourism businesses outside the central belt are resigned to playing second fiddle.

Keith, who runs a small bed-and-breakfast operation on his farm near Castle Douglas, says the few visitors who try to get to the southeast by public transport have to first travel to Glasgow and then travel back down, a less then satisfactory state of affairs. He says for that to change there would need to be a "radical change of approach" from government and public transport operators alike.

"It's chicken and egg. The provision of services would have to reach a certain level before it would start having any effect on visitor numbers. Less than a certain level of service would just not be viable, but the operators will not put on more services unless they are assured of the customers. It is a real problem - maybe the government could step in and help them?"

Back in marketing land, VisitScotland's chairman Peter Lederer says the quango's recent research shows that the majority of visitors to Scotland were "satisfied" with the ease of travel around the country.

However, Lederer concedes there is room for improvement: "Quick and easy access to and around Scotland is becoming ever more important for our visitors, as is the quality of their experience while travelling. The needs of tourists in terms of facilities - for example luggage provision on services largely designed for residents, commuters, or business travellers - can transform that experience."

In a joint statement from the Scottish government and Transport Scotland, a spokesman restated their commitment to 50% growth in the tourism industry by 2015 and stressed that the government believed improved public transport links would play a pivotal role.

He said the government had committed itself to reconnecting the Borders to the Scottish rail network and that improving transport links between Edinburgh and Glasgow and their respective airports would help tourists planning to travel across the country.

"As a government we are increasing investment in public transport, building new rail lines, improving the bus network and putting money into other forms of sustainable travel such as cycling and walking. This will improve the quality, accessibility and affordability of public transport throughout the whole of Scotland."

For Spear, such a commitment from government is welcome. But she feels the issue must be tackled with more urgency.

Referring to herself and the other tourism operators pushing for urgent action, she says: "They have to do something before all of us lot get to retirement age or otherwise we are going to be left with nothing."

The time has come to grasp the transport issue'

Paul Easto is director of Inverness-based Wilderness Scotland, an adventure tour and eco-tourism operator with 1200 customers every year and a predicted turnover this year of £750,000.

He says: "Public transport is a very interesting issue for us. Historically, the tourism industry has shied away from tackling it because it felt it was too difficult. But now the feeling is that the time has come to grasp this issue and make things happen.

"It's not been dealt with in the past because of the complexity of it. Just exactly how does the tourism industry take ideas and concepts and take them through to the strategic level? These are extremely difficult things for the industry to do, but the services the likes of FirstScotrail provide are an essential part of the tourism infrastructure. Heads need to come together at a strategic level to realise how important this is for the industry.

"Customers do get in contact with us about this. Three years ago we took the deliberate choice to begin all of our holidays from Inverness train station. The idea to encourage people to travel by train and not to fly was quite a bold decision at the time.

"From a tourist's point of view, the way the rail ticketing service works is so incredibly complex that an international visitor will struggle to buy the right ticket. That is something that can be fixed in the short term.

"The price of oil is only going in one direction and that is going to pose problems for all sorts of tourism businesses. There is real concern."