VisitBritain names Gavin Landry as Regional Director for the Americas

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VisitBritain has today announced the appointment of Gavin Landry as its Regional Director for the Americas.

In his new role, which he takes up from Wednesday 23 August, Gavin’s remit is to drive new and repeat visitor growth to Britain from the Americas, focusing on key segments and top performing regions including Brazil, Canada and the US, as well as cities with new routes to build connectivity.

His focus is also to convert the inspiration to visit into bookings by getting the right products to the right customers at the right time, developing bookable regional and seasonal products that showcase more of regional Britain working closely with tourism industry partners.

With tourism a critical part of the UK Government’s agenda ahead of future trade deals, and with the US the second most valuable outbound market in the world, Gavin will also continue to develop and strengthen strategic partnerships across the three regions.

VisitBritain Chief Executive Sally Balcombe said:

“Gavin brings a wealth of market knowledge, industry contacts and public diplomacy experience to the role. We are delighted to have such an experienced industry professional leading one of our most important global regions as we continue to inspire more visitors from the Americas to put Britain top of their list as the must-go-now destination.” ...

The announcement comes on the back of data released just last week from the UK’s Office for National Statistics which showed that visits from North America to the UK were up 35% in June this year compared to the same month in 2016. It brings the overall number of visits from North America to the UK for January to June this year to 2.2 million visits, up 25% on the same period last year.

The US is Britain’s most valuable inbound visitor market, last year worth £3.4 billion to the UK economy.

Gavin has a strong background in business and leisure tourism and has held several senior posts in the industry. He joins VisitBritain from New York State where he was Executive Director of Tourism, having led the iconic I LOVE NEW YORK (NY) programme, and where he developed and implemented strategies to support growth of the tourism industry. During his tenure at I LOVE NY, Gavin and his team increased visitation to New York State by 40 million and set a programme record total economic impact of $100 billion.