The tourism industry in UK has been critical of UK national weather forecasting and, in particular, National television forecasts which have been accused amongst other things of being too broad brush in nature (“big hand small map syndrome”), sometime too flippant in presentation; unnecessarily reinforcing negative stereotypical views, and on occasion straying beyond the remit: it will be a gorgeous sunny weekend, so do expect the road to be blocked with traffic.  The latter two issues are sometimes being created by the weather presenters themselves but equally, as often as not, by the link comments made by the main programme presenters.

As a consequence various actions have been taken at a National level to encourage better presentation by Met Office presenters (BBC) and the none Met Office weather presenters (all other broad casters) and also by other doing the links to and from weather reports. Arguably this has improved general presentation but not tackled the issue of broad-brush forecasting which, by nature, general National forecasts will always be. The solution to this we now believe may lie as much with the individual destinations and their individual businesses as it does with external agencies.

Over the same period that presentation of the weather forecast has been regarded as a major issue the Met Office and others have been developed a wide range of local weather tools; the Met Office’s being free to use.

Is your destination and/or the businesses you represent doing all they can themselves to ensure customers can get accurate up to date local forecasts?  See for example:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/guide/weather/leisure-forecast

The Met Office leisure website provides local forecasts at various types of leisure sites on one page  including: Beaches , Places of Interest   and Sport and Outdoor Recreation

There is also a separate forecast page for National Parks .

Are you or your partner businesses using links to the UK site or, where appropriate, links to individual location pages? Have you investigated other social media options?  If a lack of accurate local forcasting is seen as an issue then some of the best solutions to this may lie locally.