Welcome to Fife, the tourism team and brand at Fife Council, is celebrating success, with reported visitor numbers increasing by 8.6% in 2025. The figures, which have been recently released, also shows an economic impact of £956m, demonstrating how important tourism is to Fife’s economy.
This success has in part been due to the dedicated destination marketing campaign that Welcome to Fife has delivered for the past three years. ‘The Kingdom. Where It All Begins’ focused primarily on raising awareness of Fife as a destination to markets within a 4 hour drivetime, but also included activity that would attract a wider, international audience.
The campaign contained a mix of social media, media partnerships, and activity with Online Travel Agents. Over three years the campaign has resulted in:
- Over £24m social media impressions
- 1,826,925 video views
- 125,950 likes, comments, shares and saves
- Almost 180,000 clicks to the campaign’s dedicated landing page
- 83,808 digital article views
- £1.3m gross hotel bookings for Fife through Online Travel Agents, with a return on advertising spend of 13.3, well above the benchmark of 5.
Hilary Roberts, Lead Officer for Tourism at Fife Council said, “This is the biggest marketing campaign that Welcome to Fife has undertaken to date, and the results speak for themselves. Our aim is to create awareness of Fife as a visitor destination, and then convert that awareness to bookings and visits, ensuring that the visitor experience exceeds expectations, and encouraging visitors to continue to engage with us, ultimately coming back to the area on repeat visits. We are delighted that the results of the campaign have been so positive, and look forward to developing a new campaign for this winter that will build on this success.”
The marketing campaign is just one of the initiatives that Welcome to Fife has delivered to drive up visitor numbers. Working with local businesses to develop new products and assets, building relationships with travel operators, supporting the events sector and delivering organic social media and website content has all contributed to the growth of the sector.
Councillor Altany Craik, Fife Council’s spokesperson for Finance, Economy and Strategic Planning said, “Over 9% of Fife’s businesses are tourism related, and 8.7% of people working in Fife companies are employed in tourism businesses. It is encouraging to see the growth in the sector locally with tourism employment increasing by 9.2% in 2025. I very much hope to see this upward trend continue, and appreciate the work being done by the Welcome to Fife team to place Fife firmly on the UK destination map.”
