Academics at Strathclyde Business School have, for the last three years, been researching the potential of ancestral tourism within Scotland. This research by Dr Matthew Alexander, Dr Derek Bryce and Dr Samantha Murdy has revealed a market that has great potential for Scotland's museums.
According to Visit Scotland some 10 million people around the world are interested in finding out more about their Scottish ancestors, however only around 200,000 make the trip.
The Strathclyde research showed that while some visitors do have amazing experiences, there are also challenges that museums face in accommodating requests and visits related to ancestral tourism. Visitors may come to Scotland with limited information and find themselves frustrated at not achieving what they set out to do. What's more, hundreds of emails are exchanged between the Scottish diaspora and Scotland's large network of museums every week and responding to these queries is given freely by Scotland's large network of museums.
To tackle these challenges and ensure that the professional services that museums offer are appropriately rewarded the Department of Marketing team has created a pre-spin out company myancestralscotland.com - a website that makes local Scottish ancestral services available to the Scottish diaspora worldwide on more of a commercial basis.
More on this is available by reading Dr Alexander's blog here.