Loch Ness Monster received a nomination for local award scheme’s Highland Ambassador of the Year 2010 category.

The Highlands and Islands Tourism Awards (HITA) event management team were delighted to read the latest nomination for the Highland Ambassador of the Year category, which proposed The Loch Ness Monster for the honour.

Elizabeth Mackintosh, chairwoman of HITA said:
“Under normal circumstances all entries and nominations are held strictly confidentially but we felt that we had to share this one with the public.  Nessie has made a major impact on the positive profile of the Highlands and Islands worldwide over the years and perhaps we should seriously consider this nomination for HITA’s Highland Ambassador of the Year 2010.”

The 12 categories for 2010 are Best Use of Social Media Award sponsored by 4TM, Best Visitor Experience Award sponsored by Chivas, Community Tourism Initiative Award sponsored by Highland Council, Customer Care Award sponsored by VisitScotland, Developing People Award sponsored by Babcock, Highland Ambassador of the Year, Highland Dining Out Experience Award sponsored by Scottish Provincial Press, Young Ambassador of the Year Award sponsored by Royal Bank of Scotland, Leadership Award sponsored by Inverness College & UHI Millennium Institute, Marketing Initiative Award sponsored by British Waterways and The Green Award sponsored by Kennan Recycling and Most Enterprising Business in the Great Outdoors Award sponsored by the Cairngorms National Park Authority. 

The shortlisted finalists will be announced in October and the winning businesses and individuals will be revealed at the awards ceremony and gala dinner at the Drumossie Hotel in Inverness on Friday, 19^th November.  The high profile event attracts more than 350 representatives from the region’s top tourism, hospitality, and leisure and travel businesses.  Tickets can be purchased from 

The 12 categories for 2010 are Best Use of Social Media Award sponsored by 4TM, Best Visitor Experience Award sponsored by Chivas, Community Tourism Initiative Award sponsored by Highland Council, Customer Care Award sponsored by VisitScotland, Developing People Award sponsored by Babcock, Highland Ambassador of the Year, Highland Dining Out Experience Award sponsored by Scottish Provincial Press, Young Ambassador of the Year Award sponsored by Royal Bank of Scotland, Leadership Award sponsored by Inverness College & UHI Millennium Institute, Marketing Initiative Award sponsored by British Waterways and The Green Award sponsored by Kennan Recycling and Most Enterprising Business in the Great Outdoors Award sponsored by the Cairngorms National Park Authority. 

The shortlisted finalists will be announced in October and the winning businesses and individuals will be revealed at the awards ceremony and gala dinner at the Drumossie Hotel in Inverness on Friday, 19^th November.  The high profile event attracts more than 350 representatives from the region’s top tourism, hospitality, and leisure and travel businesses. 

To many of you small businesses, the word backup is a word that describes what other “bigger businesses” do! “Doesn’t matter for small fry like me” I hear you say! But believe me, they/you really do need to backup your files regularly, because sooner or later you are going to have a computer crash – I know from bitter experience.

When it does happen, depending on whether you have a backup or not, it will be either a formality to get your data, pictures, invoices and word documents restored to your shiny new PC, or it will be a nightmare. Don’t get caught out.

For me personally, the worst part of backing up is actually remembering to do it, or finding the time to do it and, not least, knowing how to do it and what to backup. You can’t really rely on just remembering to do a backup now and again – you need a way to do it regularly as you work without having to actually remember to do it! You shouldn’t just make copies of important files and put in a folder on your D drive either, because if your hard drive fails you lose everything on that too.

Some of you, I expect, have an external drive which you simply plug into your P.C. especially for keeping your valuable files backed up. These external drives are relatively cheap and excellent for extending the storage capacity of your computer and especially useful if you take lots of pictures which can quickly fill up your hard drive. But a word of warning – if you do use external drives to copy your important files onto, you shouldn’t keep them anywhere near your PC. Not even in the same building, because if a fire ever broke out, and they frequently do near computers, you not only lose your PC but you lose your external drive as well.

So what do you do?

You could buy a good reliable backup program, use it to schedule regular backups, by that I mean daily backups. Remember to take your external drive out into the garden shed every night as a precaution against fire. Seriously, I have done that!!

OR….

You could save a lot of time and trouble and register with DLN for an online backup package. Unlimited online backup is now available to DLN members at a massively reduced price!

What is online backup? & how does it work?

Well, basically, it is a place where you can store your important files, documents and pictures securely online so that if your computer dies for any reason, your important files will not die along with it. Then when you get your new computer it is a simple matter of logging into your online storage area to retrieve your stuff – simple.

What I like about this online backup is that once you sign up and have your storage space allocated, you select on your PC all the stuff that you want to keep safe, click “go” and it does literally send copies of everything to your online backup. You don’t have to wait, it works in the background – you carry on work and the program does the rest. Here’s another clever bit – if you change a document on your PC – for example you add a chapter to your latest novel! the system automatically sends a copy of the changed document in your secure online storage space so you never again have to worry about it.

Now here is a really amazing offer to DLN members from Tourism Site Fix you can get as much online storage space as you want for a mere £12 per YEAR! that is less than a third of the normal price! and it’s so simple to set up, even I only took 2 minutes to get started. To sign up just drop me an email andy@visitlochness.com I will set up an account for you and if you are not absolutely delighted with it I will give you your money back!

As the Destination Management Organisation at Loch Ness we regularly get feedback from visitors like the one I received recently from John.

John is a regular visitor and user of Loch Ness and just wanted to say how delighted he was to see the reinstatement of the Aldourie pier by the owners of Aldourie Castle. He also said how good it would be to see the other redundant piers around the loch improved. Could not agree more John – improving of the piers and jetties around Loch Ness has long been an aspiration of Destination Loch Ness and we are trying, improved piers would be great for visitors, great for tourism and great for the communities. Unfortunately it is an issue fraught with difficulties such as ownership and not least, the costs involved. Piers such as Inverfarigaig and Foyers require a huge amount of work if they are to be restored to their former glory and in some instances it’s not entirely clear who actually owns the pier

Personally I would be happy if we even got one restored – the Inverfarigaig pier. Inverfarigaig pier was built in the early 19th century by Thomas Telford one of Britain’s greatest civil engineers. It is one of the best places to stop and view the vast expanse of Loch Ness.

However Visit Loch Ness is doing great work raising funds to repair and restore our beauty spots and historic treasures around Loch Ness. We have a scheme in its infancy, they call it the Voluntary Payback Scheme, I call it the “keep Loch Ness beautiful” scheme as we do lots of work like annual litter pick ups, lay-by regeneration, path clearing and creation and lots of other work that helps the local environment. So when you plan a visit you may see on your booking form a request to donate a £ to the voluntary payback scheme, please say YES. You might just help to restore another Loch Ness gem.