Wales Outdoors Victorious In Campaign To Have Visit Wales See Sense
It took 5 years, 100's hours of effort by Andy and hundreds of thousands of pounds spent by Visit Wales in defence of their untenable position, but, what do you expect, it's the Welsh Government!
The Review into the Visit Wales Adventure Activity Assurance Scheme, forced by the doggedness of Wales Outdoors mountain professional Andrew Lamb, has today been made public. It’s a short read but it is a read that has put a big smile on Andy’s face.
Despite the obfuscation, enmity, and, on occasion, malfeasance exhibited by organisations such as WATO, Visit Wales Management, and some tourism professionals, such as the regional chair in South East Wales, Visit Wales has been forced to adopt Andrew Lamb's recommendations.
Visitors to Wales, from today, will now be able to access qualified mountain leaders delivering quality experiences, from countryside walks through to exhilarating mountain days through the Visit Wales platform. Hopefully many will take advantage of this new avenue to promote their businesses and Wales can truly become the outdoors destination that it should have always been. Croeso! Wales has its hwyl back.
This is the relevent assertion made by Visit Wales in the review:
‘The second recommendation is to introduce an Approved Provider route for guided walk operators who are Qualified Members of the Mountain Training Association (MTA). A robust qualification process is undertaken by individuals as part of the existing MTA programme, and the Qualified Member status ensures participants continually present evidence around Continuous Professional Development to ensure their training and experience is up to date.’
Throughout the bitter process of forcing the Welsh Government to act Andy had meetings with Mark Drakeford as First Minister, Vaughan Gething as Business Minister, was in communication with the six ministers who had responsibility for tourism in 2023/24 and had contact with Visit Wales staff from data input operatives through to Jason Thomas, the Director of Visit Wales.
All apart from Mark Drakeford were dismissive and Mark Drakeford, although pleasant, was ineffectual, doing nothing to progress the matter.
To read all about the campaigning undertaken by Andrew Lamb please visit this blog post which attempts to detail the arguments:
Finally, there is one remaining issue, that of re-sellers and agents being allowed to list guided hiking in Wales, against the current Visit Wales onboarding rules and without having any mountain qualifications or commitment to only employing qualified mountain leaders. We are afraid that that major discrepancy on delivery of onboarding protocols by Visit Wales will rumble on as an ongoing complaint…
We say one issue... There is another… We believe Andrew Lamb deserves a MASSIVE apology from the staff at Visit Wales who have over the past five years caused a great amount of headache and at times distress and, based upon the outcomes of the review, clearly have been desperately wrong in their management of the Visit Wales platform with regard to guided walking in Wales, doing both Wales Outdoors and Wales Tourism in general a diservice in the process.
Read the Visit Wales Review here:
Get £10 Off the best Map App out there by signing up to our partner in the outdoors Outdoor Active
You can book our walks and tours through the Wales Outdoors Website.
1. Subscribing monthly via Substack
2. Making a one-off contribution via BuyMeACoffee
Your support is what allows these articles to keep being created and is enormously appreciated. Thank you.
