Tourism gets a £500,000 boost in the Vale of Glamorgan

The tourism sector in the rural Vale of Glamorgan has been given a welcome boost thanks to over £500,000 funding.

Creative Rural Communities, the Vale of Glamorgan Council’s rural regeneration initiative, has supported a number of tourism projects in the region, providing a total value of £571,227 worth of funding.

Through its two schemes, Tourism Matters – a grant scheme to help the tourism sector raise the quality of facilities and improve the performance of businesses – and Visit Vale+ – a grant scheme aimed at trialling new and innovative approaches to tourism – projects have been funded with a long-term objective of increasing the number of tourists to the area.

Grants have been given to a number of holiday cottages to improve facilities, as well as tourist attractions including Liege Manor Equestrian Centre, Llandow Circuit and Seven Oaks Fishery.

Several new tourism start-ups have also received funding to help get their businesses off the ground including Southerndown Surf School, the first of its kind in the Vale of Glamorgan, Cowbridge Music Festival which is planned for October 2010, and The Welsh Cooking Course, to be put on by food company Coginio.

Other innovative projects to receive funding include an iphone application, called Activate, being developed by Ramblers Cymru. The ‘app’ aims to introduce new people to the joy and benefit of walking by introducing them to the array of hiking routes round the Vale of Glamorgan and Heritage Coastline.

Funding has also gone to The Vale Marketing Group, to update the Vale of Glamorgan’s tourism website www.gardenofcardiff.com and The Cowbridge Chamber of Trade to appoint a PR agency to promote the historic market town as a preferred tourist destination for short-break visitors.

Senior Rural Regeneration Officer at Creative Rural Communities, Rebecca Haves, said: “The Vale of Glamorgan has something for every tourist, from the unspoilt, dramatic Heritage Coastline, to the picturesque countryside and the charming villages and towns.

“Tourists come here not just from other parts of the UK put also from overseas, and in the summer it is now quite normal to hear many different languages being spoken in the area. Given the natural beauty of the area and its ideal location, it is not really surprising.

“Creative Rural Communities has a strong commitment to tourism. It recognises the importance of tourism to the economy of the area and seeks to ensure that it provides ongoing support to the local tourist industry, which in turn attracts new visitors to the area. As the success of tourism in the Vale of Glamorgan depends largely on the continued investment and rising of standards by private sector operators, the funding that we have been able to plough into new and innovative projects, as well as projects which raise the quality of facilities, has been a welcome boost.

“With increased competition from visitors, both domestically and internationally, we are keen to work with the private sector to develop and improve our tourism offer, which will benefit the long term social and economic wellbeing of the area.”

All of the above projects have received funding through the Rural Development Plan for Wales 2007-2013 which is funded by the Welsh Assembly Government and the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development. Creative Rural Communities is a regeneration and economic development initiative led by the Vale of Glamorgan Council in partnership with various public, private and voluntary sector organisations.

For further information on this press release, please contact freshbaked PR at pr@freshbaked.co.uk. freshbaked PR is a Cardiff based public relations agency which represents a number of private and public sector organisations in the Cardiff, Swansea and Bristol business communities, as well as Newport in south Wales, home of golf’s 2010 Ryder Cup at the Celtic Manor Resort Hotel. For clients based in Cardiff PR agency services are provided from the Head Office in The Maltings.