Summer City Adventure

The period from 12th July to the end of August 2010 is of particular concern to business in the city centre; specifically to hotels, leisure and retail businesses. The point of the Made it Easy meeting this morning at The Midland was to move from the discussions of 2009 about being a joined up leisure city to an action orientation in 2010. Manchester the resort! The summer is an ideal candidate, how do we know it's ideal? 43 people showed up for the meeting!

After bacon butties, coffee and Mike Magrane, GM at The Midland set out the goal of creating a credible summer proposition in Manchester, this year and every year.

Howard Raynor then followed up with a presentation about how making Manchester more family friendly this summer was a straightforward matter of co-ordinating the fantastic recources currently available in to smart itineraries and illustrated his argument with what's on in the city, what assets there are for the public. You can see this presentation by going to the World Class Service web site.

The floor was then opened up for discussion.

Key features arising fro the discussion were:

1. The concept is essentially worth more effort. Manchester could do better if we were more joined up in communicating whats on.

2. The venues and hotels need to agree the package and discounting that they can can offer.

3. Marketing Manchester will provide a e:mail entry point for people to send event information to.

4. Marketing Manchester and CityCO will co-ordinate the marketing activity to the consumer and liaise with Late Rooms.

5. Family friendly is definitely the agreed way forward. Activity led rather than destination led was also emphasised during the meeting.

6. World Class Service, through their current Manchester Concierge site, and this blog will keep people informed on progress and on the activity in the city this summer. This process will take the form of links and portals as well as overviews of key information and smaller organisations which may not be part of bigger consortia.

World Class may convert one its sites in to a business to business information point to help provide lead information for planning as well as day to day information. If we do this it will end up being paid for service due to the scale of maintenance and content management.

7. Mike Magrane will be running various related meetings with Visit Manchester and the MHA Sales Forum to try and iron out difficulties in product development.

8. Mike will also be having conversations about identity and key messages.

9. It was agreed we should meet again in a month's time to see how much progress has been made.

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kind regards

Howard