Case Study:

Capturing recent Northumberland tourist experiences for the Rural Design Centre

The challenge

The Rural Design Centre team were delivering training with Northumberland tourism businesses on customer journey mapping.

Ahead of this training, the team needed to understand tourists' recent experiences when visiting Northumberland, so that evidence-based insights could be included when facilitating the journey mapping sessions.

Hypothesis

The team had some initial research from studies previously conducted by Visit Northumberland which outlined some key quantitative data. The tourism businesses would also be bringing their own insights from speaking to their customers.

However, in order to build a more complete picture, and to bring some impartial qualitative data to the project, research with people who had recently travelled to Northumberland was needed.

What we did

We designed the study to capture anecdotal evidence of people’s recent visits, as well as finding out people’s priorities when holidaying in Northumberland. This was done with a series of interviews and a prioritisation card sorting exercise.

Participants

We set the screening criteria to ensure that we spoke to people who had visited Northumberland recently (within the last 3 months), so that people’s experiences were fresh in their memory.

We recruited via social media and ensured we screened out anyone who did not meet the requirements of the study.

Challenges

We undertook this study in January and February 2022, which made it more challenging to recruitment participants who had visited Northumberland in the last three months — essential over winter.

Had this study been done towards the end of the summer when visitor numbers were high, recruitment could have been made a lot easier.

Results

The research carried out was integral to the success of the project, and meant that the organisations involved were able to make decisions based on evidence. By having these insights, the organisation’s have subsequently benefited from: