#TenthAnniversary

It’s been a decade since Dougie Baird officially started the Twitter chat #ScotlandHour, in October 2011. He had this to say about those early days,

I used to have a general Scotland hour hashtag. I would pick an hour and put up pics and tweets about Scotland. Got a good response. Lots of tourism folk liked it. Lots of ex visitors and future tourists used it for questions. Arrive as a tourist and leave as a friend, was my motto. After a while — Fiona, Mark, Aileen, Lesley, Susan, and I met up at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and decided to make #ScotlandHour the last Wednesday in the month with structured questions and a chosen subject.

The rest, as the cliché goes, is history. And we’re still going strong! With current team members: Colin, Fiona, Kirsten and Mark. And we don’t have plans to stop hosting #ScotlandHour. If anything we learned in 2020 that our community needed the chat as a way to support one another and lift one another up during the hardest of times for tourism. We’re grateful to all who place their trust in us to be a safe place to gather.

But we did want to pause from our monthly topics to gather together and celebrate all that the chat supporting Scottish tourism has been, and all it could be in the future as well! We have so many thoughts on that. And we bet you do too. Aye this’ll be the time to share ’em.

Photo credit to Kirsten Alana