Changing Stockholm for Good!

This is real democracy in action.

Beautiful Stockholm

Stockholm Folkpartiet are preparing their programme for Stockholms Stad (City Council but larger if you will) for 2010-2014. Stockholm is currently run by the Moderates and Liberals and will go to the polls this year.

Folkpartiet Liberalerna in Stockholm have published their programme for 2010-14 and are inviting comments from everyone and no you do not have to be a FP member to add your views.

Many Political Parties are a closed shop when it comes to policy so I find this very refreshing. I get the feeling they do listen to all the comments and try and encompass the more sensible ones. They then invite contributions and debate the programme at the Party conference in May.

I read as much of the programme as I could today its in Swedish so good practice. My only concern – not much written about Tourism. Regular readers know I work in the travel sector. I am amazed at how much Stockholm has to offer yet its not on the European Citybreak map. I think Stockholm can rival the likes of Prague and Budapest so I would like to see Stockholms Folkparti doing more on this.

Now I am still not totally au fait with the Swedish Government system so I commented on Mark Klamberg’s blog on this. As you can see he responded that tourism is the responsibility of Stockholms Stad yet there was only one sentence on this in the Folkparti programme.

‘”Stockholm ska stärka sin profil som Norra Europas mest spännande besöksmål för turister och konferensgäster”.

Stockholm shall strengthen its profile as Northern Europes most exciting destination for tourist and conference attendees’.

Mark Klamberg agrees we should enhance this.

I am just pleased that Folkpartiet actively encourage their members to contribute on areas of policy.

For those of you in the UK, how often do you see Stockholm marketed to you?

I can hardly remember a time when I saw a poster for Sweden let alone Stockholm. Yet this city has so much to offer. Its safe, clean, good transport links, the archipelago is stunning, its family friendly, tolerant, 14 islands, we have so much to offer.

I have had friends visit me who have loved the place. Yet they readily admit they would never have visited Stockholm if I wasn’t living here.

Stockholms Stad can do so much more including:

Be more visible at travel trade fairs, lets show the world what we have to offer.
Carry out a Destination Promotion Strategy on Stockholm, including an analysis of who is Stockholm’s competitor in the leisure market?
Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media, audit. Can we promote Stockholm better online?
Hire Professional Destination Marketing companies to market Stockholm to Leisure and Business travellers. (Again maybe this is a budgetary issue)
Is Visit Sweden doing enough to promote Stockholm? Evaluate their activities on promoting the city. If they are not doing as much as we need then maybe its time for Stockholm Stad to be more pro-active
If Arlanda could lower its fees then maybe Ryanair could fly into Arlanda. This would help attract more tourists to Stockholm who may be put off by flying into Nyköping (Skavsta) or Västerås. Both are 90 mins or so away from Stockholm. Not the responsibility of Stockholm Stad and they should not interfere in private business but they can always lobby.
Have a presence at most of the Stockholm Congresses to try and tempt conference goers to come back to Stockholm for a leisure break.
Produce maps for the Tbana stations of the local areas with attractions. There are no street maps currently in tbana stations of nearby streets.

Of course the main goal of attracting tourism is to help the local economy. Many jobs are reliant on tourism and Stockholm Stad should be working hard to ensure Stockholm gets its rightful share of that market.

This should lead to real jobs and not ‘fake’ jobs in the public sector like the Red Greens are proposing.

The Liberal Bloggers have been hard at it today. Why not check out what others have to say?
Seved Monke, Rasmus Jonlund, Per Pettersson, Mark Klamberg, Madeleine Sjostedt,

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