News and Media
GoToBelfast.com wins Goldeneye Website of the Month
Wednesday 21 January 2004
"The Bureau was set up back in 1999 to promote Belfast as a leisure and business tourism destination. Under the leadership of Chief Executive, Gerry Lennon, and Marketing Director, John Walsh, the Bureau has managed to transform the city promotion effort in a few short years...helped, of course, by relative peace and a raft of hotel and leisure investments around the place.
All of which explains why short break tourists are now coming here every weekend (and through the week, presumably) from the South, from Scotland and from English cities linked to Belfast by low-cost airline routes (another factor in the tourist boom).
But these visitors wouldn't come here if the facilities weren't here for them. And that means all sorts of facilities - from transport to tourist information, and from hotels to restaurants and nightspots.
A lot of visitors, meanwhile, won't go anywhere unless they can do a lot of their homework on line. There's plenty about Belfast on the net, but Belfast needed a really good visitor web resource and it got it when the BVCB re-did www.gotobelfast.com the official visitor information and accommodation reservation site for the city.
Designed and engineered by Biznet, the site is up there (and in some cases, better than) equivalent sites for cities like Edinburgh, Dublin and Manchester.
It's comprehensive without being baffling, and it provides an excellent gateway for potential visitors to Belfast. It's not overly designed and graphic-heavy (like a lot we could mention), and it's easy to get around. Those are a couple of web fundamentals, of course.
Go To Belfast is built around the information resource on the city - forthcoming events, specials, sport, theatre...you know the sort of thing - and the accommodation reservation part of the equation.
Like comparable city destination sites, the reservation system lists all the accommodation options for Belfast and surrounding areas....from five-star hotels through to budget hotels, b&b's and self-catering. Users can opt for as much, or as little, information as they think they need to make an informed decision.
There's a quick and effective accommodation search engine built in, which brings up choices by star rating and other criteria. And, when it comes to the widersite, there is also a simple 'keyword' search facility. Type in 'pubs' and you get the low-down on those very establishments... and so it goes on.
There are also plenty of cheery, sunny images of Belfast (when was all that sunshine?), and links to travel organisations and related sites like that for Tourism Ireland.
Not too fussy, not too overload....just a professional, no nonsense, comprehensive site for the increasing numbers of people coming here for short breaks. And that's precisely what was needed."
The above article appeared in Business Eye magazine, January 2004.