YOU published a report about changes to visitscotland.com ("Tourism website is axed", The Herald, November 8).
While the article points out that the online booking service on the national tourism website will no longer be available, the headline is inaccurate, and could cause confusion.
The national tourism website, the definitive guide to Scotland, is not being axed. On the contrary, our revamped website gives visitors the most comprehensive picture of Scotland ever produced, while thousands of businesses are reaping the rewards of being part of such a wide-reaching online platform.
Tourism is Scotland's biggest industry, supporting 270,000 jobs and generating £11 billion for the Scottish economy. The change to our online booking system was necessary.
When visitscotland.com was developed 10 years ago, for the majority of smaller tourism businesses this was the sole channel for consumers to book directly online with accommodation establishments. Over the years there has been a change in the online booking landscape and there are now many providers.
Against this backdrop, the European Commission has been looking at the rules around state aid and has clarified that tourist boards need to address the way we work with tourism businesses around provision of booking via websites. As a result VisitScotland will no longer act as a third party in taking bookings online.
Our priority is to do what we can to help the industry find the most suitable online booking option against individual business needs.
Malcolm Roughead,
Chief executive, VisitScotland,
94 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
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