Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, what steps he is taking to encourage tourists to visit both Northern Ireland and the UK.

VisitBritain (VB) is responsible for marketing the UK as a whole to the rest of the world and have a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Tourism Northern Ireland (TNI) to work together on a variety of promotional activities. As part of this MOU, Northern Ireland products are used in marketing campaigns such as GREAT, images of Northern Ireland are used in VBImages and they participate in various business events. In particular, this year saw the Social Tourism Summit hosted by VB and TNI which brought together over 40 social media bloggers from 14 countries as well as travel delegates from the rest of the world to discuss innovations in digital travel marketing.