Gloucestershire Community Rail Partnership, along with the Travel Foundation, have launched their ‘Connecting Climate, Community & the Visitor Economy’ toolkit at a special webinar this week (26 Jan).
The webinar, aimed at community rail partnerships across the country, featured an insight into the new toolkit and highlighted how to use the tools to effectively engage with tourism industry partners. Attendees heard from High Peak & Hope Valley Community Rail Partnership, Wales on Rails and East Midlands Railway. Byway Travel and Cumbria Tourism also joined the webinar to provide the wider tourism context. You can watch a recording of the webinar here.
The toolkit has been developed by Gloucestershire CRP working with the Travel Foundation and features a number of practical case studies from across community rail and the domestic and international tourism sector. It is designed to help bring together destination marketing organisations, train operators and community rail partnerships to work together on realising the potential for rail, other public transport and active travel options in relation to tourism.
This toolkit is part of a funded project sponsored by GWR and Cross Country. Part of the project is to connect with destination marketing organisations to highlight the opportunities and benefits of working with community rail.
You can find out more and download the toolkit from Gloucestershire Community Rail Partnership’s website here.
Hannah McDonnell, Executive director at Gloucestershire CRP said: “Launching the Destination and Community Rail toolkit is an important milestone for us. A huge thanks to the numerous partners and stakeholders it was carefully designed with. We hope it stimulates successful joint working and a necessary shift towards sustainable transport being central to planning in the tourism and leisure sector.”
Alice Mannion, Campaigns & leisure promotions coordinator at Community Rail Network said: “We’re pleased to support Gloucestershire CRP in the development and launch of their tourism toolkit. The toolkit will prove to be a valuble resouce to help community rail partnerships across the country connect with destination marketing partners while raising awareness of community rail within the tourism industry.”
