Eye on Tourism
Tourism NI Links With Tourism Exchange To Drive Online Sales
Coastal Canters’, Sheans Horse Farm, Ballymoney, Co. Antrim. Courtesy of Tourism Northern Ireland.
Tourism NI has partnered with Tourism Exchange GB (TXGB) to offer tourism businesses here much improved access to all-important online sales channels and will utilise the technology to make their own website and campaigns bookable.
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XGB is a UK business-tobusiness digital platform that provides tourism businesses across every sector with an opportunity to generate online bookings, expand their channels, reach new customers and increase sales. Here in Northern Ireland, it’s being aimed at accommodation providers, visitor attractions and visitor experiences working with local council tourism authorities. James Berzins, Managing Director of TXGB, takes up the story. “We’re about growing the tourism economy and solving the problem of
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bookability,” he says. “Research carried out by VisitBritain showed that a lot of tourism product in the regions wasn’t bookable online. The further you got away from London, the less connected it became. “So that’s where the idea for a B2B tourism platform came from. We launched TXGB and brought it to market in late 2019, just before Covid. So it was probably the best time you could think of to launch a digital platform for tourism....!” Tourism’s growth challenges prepandemic, says James, are much the same as its recovery challenges
Naomi Waite, Tourism NI
James Berzins, TXGB
post-pandemic. “But a disrupted sector is a less connected sector. One of our central roles is to drive trade between different parties in tourism. On one side of the market, there are a lot of suppliers and tourism businesses....a real tapestry of businesses. How do they get their product in front of the domestic consumer and the global consumer?
“On the other side, you have the distribution organisations, big players like AirBnB and Booking.com included as well as smaller local distribution channels. Our platform helps them reach previously unreachable suppliers” TXGB’s role is to connect the thousands of SMEs that need digital enabling with the key distribution channels serving the
