Managed Business Support Services – Preliminary Market Engagement

Descriptions

The Northern Ireland Tourist Board trading as Tourism Northern Ireland (TNI) (“the Client”) wishes to appoint a Supplier to provide a Managed Business Support Service to the Tourism Industry. The Tourism Action Plan launched in January 25 outlines a strategic goal of growing the value of tourism to £2b per annum by 2035 supporting strategic growth of tourism over the next 10 years. The procurement of a Managed Business Support Provider will enable Tourism NI to adopt a flexible mechanism to deliver a wide range of tailored tourism business support and learning to the NI tourism sector. Support may include 1-1 mentoring, group mentoring, learning and development programmes, and also include content creation for online learning courses delivered via ‘ an eLearning platform, with the aim of creating end-to-end business support on behalf of Tourism NI (TNI) in a number of bespoke, strategic areas. The Managed Service will include facility for local authorities and government departments to draw down on procurement terms. Tourism NI has successfully used a similar Framework to deliver a wide range of tailored tourism specific support, mentoring and expertise to tourism businesses since 2019 . The recipients of such support, engaged through hundreds of specific projects, has included private sector tourism SMEs, local government organisations, third sector and sectoral representative bodies, with access to 190 or so mentors / experts. The framework has been considered to have been successful across key user groups such as Tourism NI, stakeholders and individual tourism businesses. The Managed Service Framework therefore has been an instrumental tool in supporting Tourism NI rapidly adapt to the changing needs of the tourism industry. Delivery ranges from 1-1 to 1-many mentoring programmes both in person and online delivery, focusing on key areas such as Sustainability, Innovation, Digitisation, Marketing and other areas. -The mentoring programmes may include business audits, the development of action plans, sector specific learning and content development.