Winner of the Bewdley Maths Trail

The summer has flown by and it was time this week to do the draw for the winner of the Bewdley Maths Trail ..... which was duly done and the winner was sent an email with the good news. 4 days later we haven't heard back from them but I will give it another day or two before I try phoning. I must admit I do worry that emails might go into people's junk mail and they don't know about the news, but on the other hand sending a quick email is so much faster than tracking down people by phone! Perhaps I should compromise a send a text if they have supplied a mobile phone number. What do you think? How do you like to receive information about say a win - email, text or phone?

Anyway, back to the topic! Bewdley is a beautiful little town which like Pershore, tries hard to market itself to tourists and it has a lot going for it. Our Bewdley Trail starts in the long term car park by the river. We are going to revamp the Trail now that the Maths Trail has expired but I think we will stick with the start point as it is so convenient. We will take in the new Jubilee Gardens which our current Trail misses out and update the clues a little now we are so much more experienced at clue writing. We don't want to change the essence of it though as we have had some of our best comments about the Bewdley Spy Mission - there is a selection below:

This year Linda from West Midlands commented "Excellent" ; Emma from Tenbury Wells said "It was great" ; Rosemary from Kidderminster told us "Did it with our walking group on a very wet February Sunday - it was great fun, we all enjoyed it".

So, if you are stuck for something to do on a wet Sunday - hot foot it to Bewdley and have a go!

August

I can't quite believe how long it is since I updated this Blog *note to self, must try harder!

Anyway, I thought I'd have a brief think about what Treasure Trails H&W did in August and share it with you dear reader.

You already know that we had a stand at the Herefordshire Country Fair at the beginning of the month but you may not know that we ended the month with a stand at the Pershore Plum Festival. This particular day out has always been a favourite of ours as Pershore itself is a lovely little town and we have a Trail that explores lots of it. We also wrote a special Plum Trail three years ago now which we thoroughly enjoyed writing and was all in verse. The Trail we have there starts at the picnic spot by the bridges just out of town and heads into town, around the Abbey and back again with one of the clues close by where we always have our stall. The feedback is always positive about Pershore, with one customer from Stourport when asked the question - how can we improve your experience saying "nothing really, found it really enjoyable".

August sales were up on the same period last year and up on July with lots and lots of you out and about exploring and we are always really pleased when people make the effort to submit their answers and give us their feedback. The best feedback received in August was from a customer living in Worcester who said "Could do with a few longer trails that can occupy a whole day".

We had a lovely article submitted by a regular Trailer about her experiences around Kidderminster which we sent off to the Kidderminster Shuttle. I spoke to them about printing it and they said they would try to if they had some space, but we don't think they managed it, so I will reprint it in the next blog post.

The lovely Christine Hope from Hopes of Longtown took a big order of Trails from us as she was advertising them in the Hereford Times during August and we were delighted to supply not only her but the Hereford, Ross-on-Wye and Leominster Tourist Information Centres all restocked as well.

We created a super personalised Trail for a hen with a very exotic job over in Bangladesh working with tigers... and she and her friends chose to spend their hen weekend in the Wye Valley which was just great. On the day they did the Trail the sun shone and we hope to get some photos and a quote or two from them soon. We also took a firm booking for a hen party next year - talk about planning in plenty of time!

Scarily one of our fellow licensees decided to do our Ledbury Murder Mystery - they had family working at Eastnor Castle for the Big Chill which was why they were in our area.... they are biased, but their comment was "We had a great afternoon in Ledbury, once again proving that Treasure Trails work for all ages as we discovered far more than we would have done trawling around the shops and cafes". They sent us a great photo for the album!

And last, but not least we experimented with using Google Ads to drive people to our website. Not entirely certain how successful the campaign was, but we will do another one in the run up to Christmas!