Mid Wales slightly behind other regions regarding coming up with ideas for Mid Wales Growth Deal

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Rowland Rees-Evans, the director of Penrhos Park at Llanrhystud, near Aberystwyth said at the annual meeting of MWT Cymru at the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth that Mid Wales was slightly behind other regions of Wales in coming up with ideas for a Mid Wales Growth Deal, which would be supported by the Government.

To quote Rees-Evans, “Visit Wales would love someone to come up with an idea like Zip World or Surf Snowdonia, as it would be a game changer for tourism in Mid Wales. There must be an entrepreneur amongst us who has an idea that can fit this criterion. At the moment, there is not enough input from the private sector and, if it is not forthcoming, I fear we may well miss this opportunity.”

Referring to Visit Wales data, Mr. Rees-Evans said that tourists and visitors spend around £663 million a year in Mid Wales. The region attracts 1.75 million British overnight visitors along with 100,000 from overseas and 11 million day visits worth £300 million annually. The tourism industry in Mid Wales employs 10,800 people directly.

“From this data, I believe that, as an industry within Mid Wales, we have plenty of room for improvement and the possibility to raise the bar again and again,” added Mr. Rees-Evans.

Both Rees-Evans and chief executive Val Hawkins stressed that MWT Cymru received no public funding towards core activities, which were supported by tourism and hospitality businesses across Mid Wales.

Mrs. Hawkins said that the significant tourism impact were made by the company’s Visitmidwales.co.uk and showmewales.co.uk websites, which contained more than 5,000 pages of information about the region.

The website this year attracted 1.5 million unique visitors – going up by 50 per cent compared to last year – and generated more than 12 million page views and 125,000 referrals to individual businesses. Sixty per cent of the traffic came from mobile devices.

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