An Open letter to the CEO of Cardiff Council

An Open letter to the CEO of Cardiff Council

Here at Fly2Cardiff we desire and want to support a vibrant Cardiff Airport as the gateway for tourists into Wales. We also recognise that Cardiff as a city has so much to offer both tourists and residents.

With that in mind we want to congratulate  you on your blueprint to make Cardiff a top tourist destination within 15 years as reported in Walesonline on 29 March 2015.

For this to happen in addition to all the new high quality hotel rooms the ambitious plans like a city metro also need to come to fruition and even the cable car scheme we read about recently. All of these things will make the visitor experience a better one. With the visitor experience in mind, we want them to have a fantastic time so much so that they come back and also tell their friends about it too. Word of mouth marketing is incredibly powerful as I’m sure you know.

In our opinion transport and great and easy to use transport links are very much part of the visitor experience. Therefore we were extremely disappointed that, inspite of detrimental affects on transport infrastructure, the BBC project was given the go ahead. By detrimental we mean the loss of the bus station (no new site agreed or it) and the lack of a drop off point for users of our excellent railway station. Transport is part of the visitor experience and needs to be integrated. Your actions in approving the BBC project appear to ignore this.

Additionally, given the importance of tourism, we are incredibly disappointed of the council’s decision to close the Tourist Information Centre. This flys in the face of the vision for Cardiff to be a tourist capital and destination. I’m sure your counterparts in Dublin and Edinburgh won’t be closing theirs in spite of pressure on the public purse. As a tourist I would expect every tourist friendly city to have a tourist information centre.

We have focussed very much on the impact that these decisions will have on tourists but the residents of Cardiff and the users of Cardiff Bus and the Railway station (the people that voted you in) will also be impacted and inconvenienced by the consequences of these decisions.

To sum up we feel they demonstrate poor judgement, a lack of commercial awareness and a total absence of joined up thinking.

We would welcome the opportunity to meet and here your rationale for these decisions because at the moment we are at a loss to understand why the people who should act in the best interests of the city’s residents and stakeholders have behaved in this way.