The now… Visit East of England, what we are and what we do

The purpose of Visit East of England is to work in partnership to grow the visitor economy of our region. We want more footfall of domestic and international visitors, year-round. We want to convert day trippers to stay visitors, and encourage more and longer breaks bringing more value to the industry.

VEE is a private sector, not for profit limited company that is the region’s visitor economy conduit to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the national tourism organisations VisitBritain and VisitEngland.

Chaired by Adnams’ Chief Executive Dr Andy Wood OBE, the current VEE board includes representatives of rail operator Greater Anglia, Stansted

Airport, VisitEngland, Norfolk County Council, Suffolk Growth and the Suffolk & Norfolk Culture Board.

It receives no core funding, but marketing funds from local authorities in Suffolk and Norfolk have helped facilitate a coalition of DMOs that promote the two counties to a domestic audience through Visits Suffolk and Norfolk and international audience through Visit East of England.

This ongoing project is the first time all Suffolk and Norfolk DMOs and local authorities have worked together. The collaborative approach has been acclaimed at a national level. VisitBritain Chairman Nick de Bois said at last year’s VEE & Partners Visitor Economy Conference that the approach was ‘trailblazing’.

Ultimately, our objective, working in partnership, is to develop a yearround visitor economy, changing the misconceived narrative that the sector is ‘seasonal, low-skilled and low-paid’. We want it to be year-round, well-skilled and well-paid.

Collectively, we want to spread demand seasonally and geographically and raise the overall tide of tourism towards the high-water mark of Summer. That will give businesses the confidence to invest in their staff and their product.

The visitor economy is worth a combined £5.5bn a year in Suffolk and Norfolk and employs around 75,000 people. This equates to about 17% of all employment, considerably more in coastal areas. The sector also supports thousands more jobs in retail, food production, culture and transport.

Visit East of England doesn’t replicate the excellent work done by local destination organisations and authorities. It amplifies that work and provides added value.

VEE established the Visitor Economy Skills Group. Led by West Suffolk College, the group successfully bid to the European Social Fund for £1.8m for its Visitor Economy Network Initiative.

Every tourism and tourism-related business can have a free listing on the Visit East of England website.

This means VEE has a business database of 6,700 contacts, allowing us to communicate regularly with the industry through informative e-newsletters, including business surveys. Its database is shared between Visit East of England, Visit Suffolk and Visit Norfolk, with consumer surveys conducted when required.

VEE has a long-standing partnership with the Suffolk and Norfolk Culture Board, which helped fund a new VEE website in 2019 with culture and arts ‘front and centre’.

VEE successfully bid for £720,000 of national funds for marketing activities Anglia is GREAT, The Friendly Invasion, Unexplored England – Enjoy Summer Safely and Unexplored England – Escape the Everyday.

The VEE website hosts the Head East campaign, highlighting the crosssector collaborative work, sending out a monthly culture and arts newsletter.

VEE authored a Destination Development Plan in Autumn 2022. A new iteration is being planned for a bid to become an accredited LVEP.

What’s Next

COAST IS

VEE supports and promotes national initiatives such as Know Before You Go and We’re Good To Go.

VEE works with sub-national transport body Transport East on emerging strategies.

Following VEE’s intervention to VisitBritain on example locations for their consumer sentiment survey, the East of England rose to the second most popular English destination after the South-West. Before they were third from bottom out of 12.

To support the regional Tourism Awards, VEE encouraged the organisers to use similar categories and the same judging criteria as the VisitEngland Awards for Excellence. This has meant that our regional winners go forward to the national finals, where this year we saw three overall winners – Watatunga Wildlife Reserve, Thorington Outdoor Theatre and Piglets B&B.