Meet Jim
Jim has devoted his career to research across a range of sectors – primarily in the travel, tourism and leisure fields, but also across energy, sport and the FMCG sectors. He also became one of Kantar’s key commentators and experts in the area of customer experience research.
At TNS, Jim was involved in all of the tourism and leisure studies undertaken by the company and he managed the Great Britain Tourism Survey – the main monitor of domestic tourism in the UK for over 10 years. In that role he also presented several papers and points of view on tourism in particular. He has developed a particular expertise in the area of visitor and traveller satisfaction and experience research.
Jim also has a vast amount of experience in Customer Experience and Brand & Comms research. He has directed many visitor satisfaction surveys and understands the dynamics of the visitor experience and the needs of travellers at key stages of their journey/trip. For example, he designed and directed the national visitor satisfaction tracker for England as well as their continuous brand and comms tracker for a number of years. He fulfilled a similar role with Tourism Ireland. He has also designed and then managed a major, continuous survey on customer experience for one of the Big Six energy suppliers in the UK as well as many other customer experience studies across several sectors.
Jim has also built a reputation within Financial Services research working with several financial services providers based in Scotland on their brand health and development.
Jim has extensive experience speaking on public platforms. At the Scottish Tourist Board he was an ambassador for the research function speaking frequently at Colleges, Universities and to audiences of business professionals. In the more recent past he has spoken at the following conferences:
• Importance of local produce in tourism - Tourism Industry event
• Measuring satisfaction in England's visitor destinations - presentation to England's Destination Marketing Organisation Chief Executives
• Measuring International Travel Satisfaction – 1 presentation at to the European Travel Commission in Bergen, Oslo and another at the European Cities Tourism Organisation in Barcelona.
• VisitEngland’s Regional Tourism Conference – a presentation on destination satisfaction to DMO managers and English regional tourism organisations in Bath in November 2011
• Measuring Tourism Marketing Evaluation - paper at the 2012 AGM of the ETC and UNWTO, Vienna, Austria
• Understanding the mobile needs of the business traveller –
a presentation at the Amadeus Annual Conference in Nice
in November 2012
• The Social Consumer – panel member discussing digital trends and how they were impacting on tourism, at the British Hospitality Association Annual Conference in London in June 2013
• English Tourism Destinations Forum – two research presentations to the Marketing Directors of English resorts on trends in tourism
• Best of Britain and Ireland Exhibition: panel member discussing whether or not the UK ‘staycation’ trends have peaked with a move to outbound travel, March 2015
• MRS Travel & Tourism Conference, May 2016: joint paper with VisitEngland on the UK’s domestic tourism market and the changing face of data collection technologies