About Smart Tourism

Smart Tourism

Smart Tourism offers marketing consultancy, business development and project management services exclusively for the tourism sector. Smart Tourism was founded by Lesley Judge (Msc, MCIM, Chartered Marketer) in 2011. Lesley works together with experienced associates to offer a wide range of marketing and project management services, with specialist expertise in providing digital communications and business development for destinations and tourism businesses. This way Smart Tourism is able to provide a flexible, comprehensive and completely tailor-made service across a range of areas, always focused on individual client needs to ensure a high quality, results-led service.

Our Experience

Our experience comes from over 20 years of hands-on work in marketing, project management and business development in the inbound tourism industry, both business to business and customer-facing roles – in Scotland and abroad.

  • Managing long-term and short-term projects for public and private sector
  • Developing collaborative tourism projects and securing relevant funding
  • Connecting businesses with academic expertise to help them develop and grow
  • Project management of website design and digital media communications
  • Digital marketing communications
  • Planning and delivering tourism events, workshops and seminars
  • Developing, driving and improving online business
  • Resource development including business case studies and industry toolkits

Clients and project work include the award-winning Destination Leaders Programme (DLP), Edinburgh Tourism Action Group (ETAG), Targeting Innovation, Loch Ness by Jacobite, Love Loch Lomond, Business Loch Lomond, ASVA (Association of Scottish Visitor Attractions) Women in Tourism and work with Interface-The Knowledge Connection for Business.  Our small team of freelance associates comprises specialists in digital marketing for the hospitality sector as well graphic design and copy-writing services.

As tourism is our passion and we’ve worked in this industry for several years, we strongly believe in “paying it forward” by volunteering our expertise where and when we can to travel and tourism communities including Scotlandhour, Travel Massive and Women in Tourism.

Smart Tourism has considerable experience of and is committed to community building through digital communications and delivering business and networking events.

Food storytelling, Data-Driven Innovation, VR…what’s next?

What have we been up to? Lesley has been working as part of the Sector Engagement team with Interface and has developed a number of collaborative projects for the tourism sector, with visitor attractions, destinations, and a wide cross-sector of organisations, focusing on data. These include:

  • Managing visitor flow for visitor attractions
  • Using AI to develop and enhance the customer journey in the hospitality sector
  • Exploring Visitor Sentiment for Destinations

Innovation has also been high on the agenda – in the design and delivery of food tourism storytelling and sense of place workshops, in partnership with Scotland Food and Drink, Connect Local, The Scottish Tourism Alliance and other industry partners; in Edinburgh and Aberdeen. The workshop objectives were to help businesses and organisations make new sector connections, take advantages of business opportunities in their own areas and bring together tourism businesses with food and drink producers to collaborate in new ways, for the benefit of visitors to Scotland.

Other successful knowledge sharing events have been developed through workshops and seminars with ASVA (Association of Scottish Visitor Attractions) in Edinburgh and Glasgow; bringing together the latest academic expertise on immersive technologies including VR and AR and allowing ASVA members and guests the opportunity to explore how to use these to engage with audiences.

Want to find out more about how we can help you develop your business? Contact us.