COVID-19 Supporting our Partners

For the past twenty years, NGI has worked with local authority partners, the cultural sector, businesses, universities, colleges and many more brilliant organisations to make NewcastleGateshead a great place to live, visit, work and invest in. We are all, frankly, gutted that due to reasons outside all of our control, we will be sharing our great city with fewer visitors in coming months.

At the same time, we wholeheartedly understand and embrace the important role we need to play to look after all of our staff, visitors, students and residents.

In response, we’ve diverted all of our people to work on activities that will engage and support the impacted tourism and business community in the region during this difficult period.

We know you will all be working hard to just keep things going right now, so we’ve taken some time to think about how we can best support you to feel more informed, more empowered and less alone.

Partnership means partnership – through good times and bad

We love working with you to promote our great city and your great business. We recognise that for many of our SME partners in the hospitality, leisure tourism and culture sectors the impact of the current situation is devastating. At NGI, we want to support you during this period and therefore we agreed to waive six months’ partnership fees for any SME partners in the hospitality, leisure tourism and culture sectors whose partnership was up for renewal in the first quarter of 2020. We recognise that this is just a small gesture but this is our first commitment to you and we will continue to look at new and additional ways we can support you during this period.

Access to government support

To help further, we commit to ensuring that we update you on the packages of support available for your sector. The government has announced that this support will be administered by your local authorities. NGI will be working closely with Newcastle and Gateshead councils to ensure you get signposted to all the support available. The current support packages announced are detailed here.

Live tourism intelligence

For regional and national authorities to understand and act on the support required for the sector they need up-to-date intelligence detailing the impact. Our nationally recognised research team are collecting data and insights and feeding them into DCMS, VisitEngland, the NELEP, business lobby groups and Newcastle and Gateshead local authorities. There are a number of ways you can contribute and share intelligence:

T-stats is our free-to-access tool which provides live tourism intelligence. In order for us all to benefit from this, and for NGI to take informed and decisive action on your behalf, we ask that you contribute your data. To get started, please contact research@ngi.org.uk
If you would like to provide an update on how Covid-19 is affecting your business, please email research@ngi.org.uk

National sector updates

We will use the research and intelligence we collate alongside our access to official information to keep you updated with everything we learn. As such we’ve created a dedicated page sharing the latest updates from the Tourism Industry Emergency Response Group as well as government and other national stakeholders.

Reach a wider leisure audience with your news and updates

The current situation is resulting in changes, postponements and cancellations to leisure programmes and facilities information. Please be sure to email your updates to hannah.lambert@ngi.org.uk and we’ll ensure all your listings on the NewcastleGateshead website are up to date.

Tell us about your innovation and resilience and share best practice

If you’re planning any alternative forms of leisure or cultural event delivery (e.g. virtual content) to engage audiences, or have online resources or products available, please let us know as we will be creating new content to support your offer during the coming weeks. Please email hannah.lambert@ngi.org.uk. We commit to sharing best practice across the sector.

Tips, advice and guidance

We have curated a list of resources (webinars, podcasts etc.) which we think can help with business resilience. If you’d like to contribute your expertise, please contact shelley.johnson@ngi.org.uk.

We’re here to support you through the difficult times our region is facing. Should you have any specific concerns or queries, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. We will have a team answering all enquiries via info@ngi.org.uk