Currently our Travel Trade and Business Visits & Events activities across the USA are managed and developed from VisitBritain’s Chicago office.

With effect from the 1st April 2007 we will be relocating the two Travel Trade positions (manager and executive) to the hub office in New York which provides an exciting opportunity to take full advantage of the east coast region in the following way:

- The NY tri-state area is the powerhouse of the US travel trade as it boasts the highest concentration of US/UK trade contacts. Therefore it makes good business sense to re-direct the additional resource over to New York in order to improve our relationship with key accounts and generate higher quality market intelligence.
 
- NY is where our strategic partners expect to do business with VisitBritain – for example VisitLondon, VisitWales and Marketing Manchester all have Travel Trade managers working as implants from our NYC hub office
 
- NY is the entry or departure point for most of our UK-based trade stakeholders when they make sales visits to the USA, and so we will be enhancing our route-to-market capability by moving our trade team to the hub.
 
- The move provides greater integration with our NY based consumer marketing team.  This ensures that all our travel trade activities are aligned with our consumer marketing which is especially important given the current drop in business from the US
 
We will however maintain our representation in Chicago but our focus will be on the business sectors which provides the greatest potential in central region USA, namely the Incentives/Meeting Planners and the highly lucrative Associations sector
 
For further information, please contact: david.childs-clarke@visitbritain.org

Date: 24.10.06