Tourism agency Welcome To Yorkshire is rolling out its marketing campaign for next year’s Tour de France by leveraging this year’s 100th anniversary race.
The county will host the event’s 2014 Grand Depart and has launched a major promotion during this year’s Tour with no less than six Yorkshire-branded convertible cars – complete with giant revolving Ys – driving in this year’s publicity caravan which drives an hour or two ahead of the riders.
The vehicles will be seen by the millions lining the length of the 3,600km route.
Welcome to Yorkshire also sponsored a Tour de France themed garden at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show.
The body, which it has won awards at the show for the past three years, produced a garden that evokes the rolling hills, hay meadows, dry stone walls and agricultural drinking troughs of the Yorkshire Dales, through which the Tour will pass.
Sheep graze as a peloton of cyclists, represented by an installation of cycle wheels, rushes past, framed by a backdrop of sinuous hedge profiles representing the iconic Dales.
The Tour will pass through many of Yorkshire’s fine cities, market towns and villages, some of which are commemorated in the water feature that celebrates the route of Yorkshire’s Grand Départ.
The garden won a silver-gilt medal at the world famous RHS Chelsea Flower Show and was voted by the public their favourite artisan garden.
The promotional strands are also supported by an online Grand Depart film
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Gary Verity, chief executive of Welcome to Yorkshire, said: ‘Yorkshire tourism is all about being the best and coming up with innovative, ground-breaking new ways to market our great county. After securing the Grand Depart of the Tour de France for Yorkshire next year, we felt we needed to help bridge that gap and capitalise on the run up from a tourism point of view.’
‘We want it [The Grand Depart] to be grandest in the history of the Tour de France. We want ours to be the biggest and best and have the most economic impact it can have for the good people of Yorkshire.’
Links
Yorkshire Grand Depart
Welcome To Yorkshire Website
Le Jardin De Yorkshire
