Go Rural

About Go Rural Scotland

Go rural for tourists and city visitors

Go Rural Ltd aims to provide information, suggestions and offers to people living in or visiting Scotland's cities to encourage them to enjoy day trips, short breaks and holidays in rural Scotland. Rural Scotland has a huge variety of exciting, beautiful and different tourism offers for people to experience.

Go Rural for Businesses

Go Rural provides a listing service for rural tourism businesses to showcase the best of a range of rural tourism attractions and offers. In many other countries it is common for a large % of a city population to leave the city most weekends and stay in the countryside or make multiple trips out of the city. With the increasing interest in country life and an increasing awareness of Scotland’s high quality food and drink, this Go Rural aims to build on this demand for rural experiences and make it easy for people to leave the city to experience rural tourism businesses.

• Customer service and collaboration/cross-selling training for owners and staff and the opportunity to become a Rural Ambassador will be part ofthe Go Rural experience
• Go Rural will encourage businesses to promote and recommend other businesses by developing a business to business discount scheme, so business owners can experience other rural businesses for themselves
• People are wishing to book on-line and Go Rural will allow people to book a package making up a day out or short break on one website
• The economic impact of Go Rural will be measured via this on-line booking system to provide information on ROI for individual businesses and for Go Rural, Scottish Enterprise, Visit Scotland and other project partners

Who came up with Go Rural?

Go Rural was devised by a team of Rural Leaders taking part in the 2012 Scottish Enterprise Rural Leadership programme.

Go Rural partners

Go Rural partners are: Angus Council (as part of a European funded Rural Tourism Business Support project), the Association of Self Caterers, NFU Scotland, Scottish Enterprise, Scottish Land & Estates and VisitScotland.

Go Rural Pilot (to March 2013)

Go Rural is a pilot project which will run to March 2013; the aim is to roll out the concept to other Scottish cities during 2013. The pilot will focus on the ‘Edinburgh residents’ market segment and will encourage this group to make multiple trips to businesses within a 90 minute travel time from Edinburgh.

What is different about Go Rural?

• Go Rural will give visitors different transport options and directions to get to their chosen location
• Go Rural will give visitors ideas for an authentic rural experience. Go Rural will feature the people behind the experience, their high levels of customer service
• Businesses will offer incentives to Go Rural users e.g. free coffee with lunch, free logs for wigwam stay etc.
• Go Rural members will also be rewarded for making multiple trips to different businesses