An Oxford tour guide is protesting on Broad Street against Oxford City Council and Visit Oxfordshire over what he claims to be a monopoly funded by taxpayer money.
Alasdair de Voil, known locally and to tourists as the “Mad Hatter”, claims that Visit Oxfordshire do not offer unbiased or impartial information on walking tours in Oxford and that council tax is being used to prop up a monopoly and undermine local tour guide operators.
He believes that Visit Oxfordshire gives preferential treatment to the tour run by the Guild of Guides, which he says does not pay the fee of £360 plus VAT a year for the partnership scheme to which tour guides in the city can join for standard membership.
This membership includes benefits such as having leaflets on display in the Tourist Information Centre on Broad Street.
Mr de Voil says that this is a private company and yet is funded by £250,000 per annum in council tax funds.
He claims that 98% of the adverts on their website are for their own “official” tours, despite not paying the partnership fee. Due to this, he believes that Oxford City Council and Visit Oxfordshire are unfriendly, inept and corrupt.
He said, “The visitor information centre does not operate for or on behalf of either the interests of independent tour operators or the general public.
“If the visitor centre were run fairly and professionally without their own blatantly gross conflict of interest to do not much else than market their own selected ‘Official Oxford walking tour’, then the marketplace would be much more accessible to us.
“Like nearly all other enterprising local individuals who have paid Visit Oxfordshire a partnership fee, we are extremely unhappy with how Visit Oxfordshire delivers the visitor information service- which is supposedly a public function tendered to them by the local council.
“Tour operators like myself have paid them partnership fees and seen almost no return on investment at all. We have also sent random people inside to check out what their staff are telling the public. They usually won’t tell you about any other tours unless you ask them to do so and because the centre’s signage and windows and reception counters only offer you one choice, most people never realise to ask otherwise.
“In any business, one has competition and as guided tours is an unregulated industry, there’s also unfortunately lots of false advertising dominating our marketplace opportunity today too.
“Oxford’s small businesses are struggling enough without having to compete with a publicly funded public service, whose remit, almost anyone would have assumed, is to support and benefit businesses like ours. Instead, we have to compete with them. This is not fair and it’s corrupt use of public money to be propping up a monopoly interest.”
Giles Ingram, chief executive of Visit Oxfordshire, said in response to the allegations, “We are not in any way corrupt and we are very open in the way our policies and procedures work, which have been examined and all been found to be above board. We have been totally above board in all our dealings.
“Our website reflects our policies and the way in which we work, which again has been scrutinised thoroughly by exterior bodies. All of these issues have been set out in our policies.”
He said in regards to the Guild of Guides not paying the partnership fee “They do subscribe.”
A quality charter has been introduced on the recommendation of the Local Government Ombudsman to which all tour operators have been asked to sign up and all other recommendations have been met in full.
He reiterated that Visit Oxfordshire had been unable to come to an agreement with Mr de Voil and he has been offered a refund of his membership.
