VisitBritain was named "Best National Tourist Board" at the British Travel Awards 2010.
Winners are chosen by consumers themselves along with the leading travel professionals in the UK. More than 220,000 consumers cast their votes electronically for the UK’s favourite travel companies and organizations in an awards process that ensured integrity and transparency by being verified by city auditors Deloitte LLP.
The awards were publicized, and consumers encouraged to vote, through the British Travel Awards media sponsors. These included the News International publications – The Times, Sunday Times, The Sun and News of the World - and also through the Global Radio Group stations such as LBC, Heart and Classic FM.
The awards were handed out at a ceremony at Battersea Evolution in London, before an audience of more than 1,100 industry leaders.
Sandie Dawe, CEO of VisitBritain, pointed out some of the company's recent accomplishments. "In the past 12 months we promoted 'Value Britain' on the back of a falling pound, and signed a three-year extension to our promotional partnership with the Premier League. We overhauled our award-winning consumer website VisitBritain.com to deliver content tailored to each person who visits the site and made huge strides in social media. We were placed among the top 20 brands on Twitter, won a five out of five quality rating on Facebook, delivered 3 million videos on YouTube and 95 percent of our website images are user-generated contributions from Flickr."
VisitBritain has also created a "clear and simple marketing strategy" based around three core themes – Classic Britain, Dynamic Britain and Luxury Britain. The strategy, she says, will help them achieve a sustained uplift in tourism after the 2012 Games.
