VisitScotland goes for major restructuring of tourism portal

Austrian web specialist Tiscover has taken a 35 percent stake in E-tourism, the holding company of VisitScotland.com. It has also agreed to invest a “substantial” sum in its future development, as per the information avaliable.

The deal will also see VisitScotland, which replaced the Scottish Tourist Board, raise its stake in the site from 25 percent to 36 percent. Developer Atos will see its stake reduced from 60 percent to seven percent. No financial details have been released.

The deal is said to be pivotal to a plan to develop the VisitScotland.com website, contact centre and tourist information centre booking system into a faster and better service.

VisitScotland.com spokesperson reportedly said linking up with Tiscover would enable the company to answer some of the criticisms it has faced from within the industry. “Tiscover are at the cutting edge of tourism technology. What we will be able to do now will help us be more flexible for people within the tourism industry and increase the number of visitors to Scotland.”

“Tiscover technology is giving us the opportunity to engage even more with the tourism industry and offer an array of options to display their accommodation,” added the spokperson. “It will give us the tools to allow them to take their own bookings and ensure that there is more collaboration between all tourism businesses.”

As per the information available, VisitScotland.com plans to offer a new suite of products to tourism businesses from next March that will address complaints from smaller tourism businesses that they are forced to allocate a percentage of their rooms to the site and pay commission fees for any bookings made. Tiscover has already been pivotal to the creation of one product that allows self-catering premises the option of avoiding paying commission fees by taking bookings through their own websites, which are underpinned by VisitScotland.com.

“It is hoped that Tiscover, which through its partnerships with other travel websites and internet portals gets 385 million page reads a year, will create a faster and more powerful VisitScotland.com. Scotland’s internet booking agency’s target is to increase its online visitors by 50 percent to 15.9 million in 2008. It chalked up 10.5 million visitors in 2005. In the first four months of this year, online accommodation bookings through the site have risen by 76 percent,” according to media.