‘Smiles not pitchforks’ is the message to Sutherland communities this season as agencies get ready to welcome visitors as soon as restrictions permit.
A new sustainable tourism sub-group has been set up by the Sutherland Community Planning Partnership to help communities regain the confidence needed to welcome visitors after a traumatic 2020 season.
David Watson, manager of Kyle of Sutherland Development Trust is leading the group and says the pandemic not only made people realise the importance of tourism in the Highlands, but also made them anxious about strange faces.
He told an online meeting with Brora residents: “The social side of tourism is every bit as important as the environmental and financial aspects.
“We saw that tested in July last year when the first lockdown ended and, after everybody in the Highlands very diligently stayed at home to avoid the virus, all of a sudden the flood gates opened and communities were overwhelmed with visitors.
“And that created understandable anxiety from the perspective that a lot of the visitors arrived before many of the services were open, and also there weren’t the facilities there to cope with the amount of visitors.
“It was unprecedented.
“One of the knock-on effects that that has had is it’s really affected the attitude of a lot of people to faces they don’t know.
“It’s created a little bit of difficulty with the Highland welcome that we’re so proud of, and people are now not as confident welcoming visitors into their communities as they were before.”
The new group will meet later this month and create an action plan to look at what needs to be done.
Mr Watson said: “It’s to try and help the communities to reclaim their confidence, to feed into the process and understand what they can sustain in the future.
“It’s all about getting the smiles back and welcoming people with smiles rather than pitch forks, getting them away from taking pictures of people’s number plates and actually get back to what we were really good at, which is welcoming our communities.”
Mr Watson said a silver lining from the pandemic is that public bodies were now taking proactive steps to address the issues deriving from tourism pressures.
“A certain amount had been done on well-known hotspots in Highland prior to the pandemic, but now work is being done proactively, especially by Highland Council which has undertaken an audit of what’s available to identify the gaps,” he said.
Helmsdale community council is one of the community representatives on the new sub-group.
Secretary John Whitfield said: “ Tourism last year was a big issue and has left people fearful.
“We had a new type of visitor in the late summer, those called dirty campers, leaving faeces and toilet paper in every layby.
“Helmsdale public toilets were closed by Highland Council and we’ve been trying to take them over, but progress is slow.
“We’re facing similar slow progress on trying to get our campervan site up and running in Helmsdale.
“We’re very supportive of the sustainable element of tourism that David’s trying to promote.
“You need to sustain it, or else there will be a backlash against the industry from the locals who aren’t dependent on it because they don’t want to see lots of people coming in who might bring Covid in, or are wrecking the environment.”