2024: A fantastic year for the growing Destination Lincolnshire team

It has been a busy and successful year for Destination Lincolnshire as we continue to work with our partners to grow the county’s visitor economy.

Destination Lincolnshire works with hundreds of people who run tourism, leisure, hospitality and retail businesses across Greater Lincolnshire. We all share the same goal – to make Lincolnshire a top 10 destination for leisure and business.

A lot of hard work goes on behind the scenes to achieve this and it is testament to the growing DL team and the input of our partnerships and service level agreements with local district councils and key stakeholders.

This year also saw Greater Lincolnshire and Rutland achieve LVEP accreditation, which is a fantastic milestone for Destination Lincolnshire.

2024 has been a hectic, but rewarding, year for our digital team – Reece Smith, Dan Sleeman, Emily Pearson and the newest addition Alana Clifton.

A particular highlight for the digital team was the launch of the new Lincolnshire Coast and Visit Lincoln websites in April and September 2024 respectively.

Reece said: “The new Visit Lincoln website unlocks a lot of new technology to better serve the needs of visitors to the city.

“The Lincolnshire Coast website encourages new visitors to the coast and addresses seasonality in the area. It provides us with a good base to run our campaigns in that area.”

Reece was also particularly proud of completing a photography project with Visit England to market Lincolnshire on a national level. All of the images that were submitted to the Visit England library were accepted, including photos of aviation heritage and historic houses, with a big thanks to Tony Pleavin for his work on this shoot.

Engaging content is another big part of the digital team and Emily is the eyes and ears of Visit Lincoln, working with our consumer facing brands with engaging blogs, social media posts, business listings and events. She also produced both the Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter editions of our 2024 City & Countryside Guide.

She said: “In 2024, I have produced two new city guides, leading on the project for the first time.

“I also supported with the design process for the new website and acted as content lead as we moved into the delivery stages, producing over 50,000 words (and counting!).

“I continued my ongoing work on the Visit Lincoln social media channels and have successfully grown the audience across both Instagram and Facebook.”

Karla Odlin and Arianne Davey have been together as the campaigns team for less than a year and are already making big strides. The digital and campaigns teams work closely as the wider marketing team and together they have achieved great results in 2024.

The work of the campaigns team included partnering with City of Lincoln Council and Lincoln BIG to deliver a highly successful Halloween in Lincoln campaign, which surpassed last year’s results by over 1,000%.

The Christmas in Lincoln campaign included working with an influencer Candace Salters. Within the first 48 hours of her reel going on social media it attracted 28,000 views and this has now risen to over 56,000.

Karla said: “Over the past six months with Destination Lincolnshire, several key achievements stand out.

“Both the Halloween and Christmas campaigns were major highlights, drawing significant attention and engagement.

“We are preparing for a number of exciting countywide campaigns and initiatives scheduled for 2025, positioning us for an even more successful year ahead.

“I’m excited to be part of Destination Lincolnshire as we continue to grow and create impactful projects.”

Arianne worked across nine campaigns in her first year at DL across Visit Lincoln, Cycle Lincolnshire and Discover Boston.

She launched Boston’s ‘The Original Explorer’ campaign in March, which is part of our UK Shared Prosperity Funded activity to drive new visitors to the area and improve perception of place.

A survey post campaign showed that 47% of respondents said that after seeing the campaign assets and Discover Boston website they are likely to visit the town for a day trip. Close to 70% said they would want to explore the local food and drink offering, with 52% wanting to explore shops and retail.

Word association data showed that the campaign assets and Discover Boston website has improved visitor perception of the town, with positives relating to its appearance, nature, green spaces, local culture and heritage.

In addition, Arianne is currently working on four campaigns that are set to launch in January 2025 with more projected during the first quarter of the year.

She said: “I’m particularly enjoying working on our first campaign using our new Lincolnshire Coast branding and website; our Taste Lincolnshire project in partnership with North East Lincolnshire Council; Spilsby Light Night; and on the campaign for Boston Brilliance – a brand new light festival heading to the town in February 2025.”

The relationship management and commercial growth operations spearheaded by our commercial team supports the delivery of the Destination Management Plan and Local Visitor Economy Partnership Growth Plan.

Holly Christian is crucial to getting new partners on board and maintaining existing partnerships. In 2024, she welcomed 30 new partners on board.

She established three visitor economy networks across the county to support businesses (22 meetings in total), as well as holding seven partner events including Belton House and Lincoln Cathedral.

Holly also helped to launch the Greater Lincolnshire & Rutland Tourism Excellence Awards 2024-25 to take them in house.

Holly’s other big projects in 2024 have included Unmissable North Kesteven, and Dynamic Growth. Along with her DL colleagues, Holly has also been working on the SK – Going for Growth project which launches in 2025.

Holly Hart joined in November as Commercial Manager and has already set the ball rolling on the 2025-27 commercial strategy to ensure the sustainability of Destination Lincolnshire and the effectiveness of our brands far in to the future.

Joseph Verney joined as our in-house Visitor Economy Journalist, creating engaging B2B blogs to help showcase our success stories and bring them to life.

Ginny Askam continues to make positive strides, working alongside our delivery partner Threshold Studios, on the £1.45m Lincoln Connected Project, which is funded by the Lincoln Town Deal via the city council.

This year has seen key delivery milestones, including the launch of our new Visit Lincoln website in September, which facilitates new and exciting ways to communicate with visitors and businesses. This new technology will enable businesses to have access to a new B2B content and Data Hub which will encourage further engagement into destination marketing.

An extensive city centre wayfinding report was also completed in 2024. This full audit has identified all the challenges and opportunities Lincoln offers when moving visitors around the city.

This will provide vital information for the second phase of this element of the project with six digitally interactive wayfinding signs.

A further two creative commissions have attracted a different audience to the city – The Imporium and Eulogy by Darkfield. The significance of this event was that tickets were booked online through our new bookable website – the first example of how the three interventions of the project interrelate and engage with our visitors, encouraging them to share their experiences online with family and friends.

Business Manager Jayne Warren works hard behind the scenes to ensure everything keeps ticking over.

She said: “Destination Lincolnshire commissioned a 12-month research programme with residents, visitors, non-visitors, and businesses across Greater Lincolnshire to gain a comprehensive and robust understanding of our visitor economy, its strengths, weaknesses, and where we need to improve to maximise Lincolnshire’s potential.

“This has fed into the development of a county wide Destination Management Plan which was developed by Destination Lincolnshire working in collaboration with councils, stakeholders and businesses across the county.

“A key part of the development of the Destination Management Plan was to consult with businesses, gathering thoughts and evidence on their current challenges, ways we can address them, and how we can work together to: generate prosperity in local communities through visitor spend, support local communities to work in the visitor economy, enabling social mobility, and reduce any negative impact from tourism on local communities.”

The efforts of the whole team in 2024 have been underpinned by the great leadership of Chief Executive Charlotte Goy, and we all wish her a happy maternity leave. Laura Freer will be rejoining the team in January 2025 as Director of Growth and Interim CEO.

Charlotte said: “We have grown the team with exceptionally talented people who not only do their job, but deeply care about the impact they have on businesses and visitors. I very much look forward to 2025 and activating our plans.”

Reflecting back on the year, she added: “2024 has been an exceptional year for Destination Lincolnshire as an organisation and this is down to the passion and drive of our team and partners.

“We worked with over 500 people to develop a new 10-year strategy – the destination management plan - for the visitor economy. We also relaunched VisitLincoln.com thanks to partnership working with City of Lincoln Council and their Levelling Up funding from the Lincoln Town Deal.

“This year also saw Greater Lincolnshire and Rutland achieve LVEP accreditation after our bid unlocked growth opportunities for the area’s multi-billion-pound visitor economy.

“Despite challenging headwinds of a national election, inflation, and uncertainty for businesses of all shapes and sizes, we have always looked for positives. It is this attitude that means we’re rounding off 2024 in one of the strongest positions we have ever found ourselves in.”

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from everyone at Destination Lincolnshire!