Everyone who matters already uses it
Look at how the world's leading destinations present themselves to travellers. Saudi Arabia is VisitSaudi.com. Florida is VisitFlorida.com. Qatar is VisitQatar.com. England is VisitEngland.com, Scotland is VisitScotland.com, Wales is VisitWales.com and Britain is VisitBritain.com. California, Jamaica, Portugal, Greece, Abu Dhabi, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland all use the same pattern. The list is endless.
Those official sites belong to their tourism boards, and Visit Travel Group is not affiliated with them. They matter because they prove the point: Visit plus a destination is the name the tourism world trusts. Our own portfolio holds the same pattern on .co.uk, the extension the UK trusts, from VisitMalta to VisitMiami and VisitFlorida. See why on our page about why Visit + Destination names matter.
A brand the industry has already paid for
UK viewers see Visit England, Visit Wales and Visit Scotland on television every week, alongside campaigns from Visit Qatar, Visit Saudi and destinations around the world. Industry experts believe the collective spend on promoting Visit + Destination brands exceeds $1.5 billion a year. That spend has taught British travellers one thing: Visit plus a place is the official guide. A destination that adopts the name inherits a brand the whole industry has built, and does not have to pay to teach it.
Where the money goes, and where the enquiries come from
Boards spend heavily on brochures, on trade events and roadshows that persuade travel agents to sell the destination, on billboards and digital advertising in the UK, and on press campaigns. All of it is expensive, and most of it ends in the same place: a traveller typing an address, or asking an AI assistant. Most of the traffic and the enquiries now arrive through the internet and, increasingly, through AI.
So the most cost-effective route to more visitors is the address at the end of every campaign. Take a travel domain that is the destination's name, make it a Visit + Destination .co.uk, and every pound of marketing works harder because it lands somewhere travellers trust.
A digital billboard in every UK town and city
Research by Nominet, the registry for .uk and .co.uk, found that despite many years of .com, around 50% of the UK still associate a .com address with American websites, while 92% of the UK population trust .co.uk, which stands to reason because it is what they see almost everywhere. An earlier Nominet survey found that 77% of British consumers prefer a .uk address to a .com when searching for information. A Visit + Destination .co.uk therefore works like a digital billboard in every town and city in the UK, running around the clock. Whether your campaign is digital, television or press, a familiar, trusted address supports higher click-through and better retention, and brings down the cost of winning each visitor.
Why the same campaign works harder on a .co.uk
Many tourist boards run press, magazine and digital campaigns that are hugely expensive, and every one of them ends with an address. Take the same campaign and send it to a .com in one case and to VisitMalta.co.uk in the other. The creative, the audience and the budget are identical. Only the address differs.
The address is visible in the advertisement itself, in the display URL of a search or social advert and in the printed line of a magazine or press ad. A UK reader sees a .co.uk as local and familiar and is more likely to click or remember it, while a .com can read as an American site. Digital advertising platforms reward that: a higher click-through rate and a better landing-page experience raise the advert's quality score, and a higher quality score typically means a lower cost per click for the same position. Press and magazine readers who trust the address are also more likely to type it in and to come back to it.
The result we expect is a higher click-through rate, a lower cost per click and stronger retention from the same spend. We make no promise of a specific figure, because results vary by campaign, but the mechanism is straightforward, and it is why the address should be chosen before the campaign is bought.
A campaign ends. A platform keeps working.
A billboard or press campaign costs a great deal and stops the day the payment stops. An AI-powered platform on a Visit + Destination .co.uk is always on. It answers travellers, collects enquiries and is found by search engines and AI assistants every day of the year, and its value builds over time rather than expiring with a campaign.
The cost of one member of staff in the UK, including salary, can instead fund an AI-powered platform that works for your destination around the clock: increasing inbound tourism, growing MICE revenue and promoting foreign direct investment, with your brand present, in effect, on a digital billboard in every major town and city in the country. If your marketing budget is going into campaigns that finish, redirecting part of it to a platform built around your destination is, in our view, the better return.
Built for the way people now plan
A family opens ChatGPT or Claude and types: "We want a holiday in Florida, near the beach, for two adults and four children, with a budget of £5,000." Within moments they have a shortlist, a plan and a price, and many go on to book from the conversation. Our future of travel page explains where this is heading.
Our platform works at both ends of that moment. For the traveller, an AI concierge on your own address answers from the board's approved material, plans the trip and leads to booking. For the machines, a sourced, structured platform on a Visit + Destination name is built to be found, trusted and cited by search engines and AI assistants. We cannot promise rankings or any particular assistant's behaviour, but we give your destination the strongest foundation to be the source. The model is set out on our AI platform page.
More than a tourism site: a national portal
Because the portal is AI powered and rich in content, it does far more than promote holidays. It carries guidance on how to invest, how to set up a business and how to relocate, and search engines and AI assistants pick that up. One address then drives:
- Inbound tourism from the UK, one of the largest outbound markets in the world.
- MICE: meetings, incentives, conferences and exhibitions.
- Foreign direct investment, from investors, developers and businesses looking to expand or relocate.
- Hotels, airlines and travel partners, all connected through the same platform.
One address, one platform and one budget line, with several outcomes.
Hotels on the portal: a revenue line for the board, a saving for the hotel
Some tourist boards now list local hotels on their portal for a small fee. Here is what we would expect that to mean, worked through. We do not promise these figures. They are an illustration of the scale.
- The listing fee. Each hotel pays the board a small fee, for example £100 a month, or £1,200 a year.
- The bookings. We would expect at least 100 bookings per hotel a year from a portal on a trusted .co.uk, each one a direct booking with no intermediary.
- The booking value. A family's accommodation for a week averages around £1,000 (NimbleFins, based on ONS data), so 100 bookings is about £100,000 of hotel revenue.
- The commission avoided. Intermediary commission is commonly cited at 15% to 25% of the booking value, which is £15,000 to £25,000 a year for that one hotel. After the £1,200 fee, the hotel is still ahead by roughly £13,800 to £23,800.
Now scale it. With ten hotels on the portal, that is about 1,000 direct bookings, around £1 million of hotel revenue and £150,000 to £250,000 of commission the hotels no longer pay. The board receives £12,000 a year in listing fees from those ten hotels alone, and the figure grows with every hotel that joins. The hotels see a clear return, so the platform funds itself and the board's visitors book through a source they trust. For a hotel group with many properties the saving is larger again. Actual results depend on each hotel's contracts and booking volumes. The hotel side is set out on our hotel partner page.
How we make it work
We hold the name
Visit + Destination names on .co.uk, listed in our portfolio and destination guides.
We build and run the platform
An editorial portal with a concierge that answers only from the board's approved knowledge base and says so when it does not know. The board keeps its voice and its authority. Options for working with a name are on our build, manage or lease page.
We connect the network
Hotels, airlines and travel partners connected to the portal, with plain reporting on visits, enquiries and bookings for your stakeholders.
We work to your governance
We agree attribution, disclaimers and the boundaries of what the platform may say. On VisitMalta, the legal wording was approved by the airline's lawyers, and we expect the same discipline with every partner. Each page shows when it was last verified.
Proven in Malta, next in Miami
VisitMalta.co.uk is built in partnership with KM Malta Airlines, which is wholly owned by the Government of Malta. It combines destination editorial, an AI concierge named Melita and a booking route for hotels and flights. We are now building VisitMiami.co.uk. If you represent a destination, tell us where, and we will tell you whether we hold the name. Use the form below or the contact page.
Last reviewed 2 October 2026