Why Glasgow is beyond the Fringe 40 miles away but worlds apart, says festival chief

Now the Fringe is appealing for an entrepreneur to come forward and help in its threepronged strategy to break the festival's most persistent tradition - its inability to attract huge numbers of visitors from Scotland's west coast.

Figures suggest that only four out of every 100 visitors to the Fringe are from Glasgow and Paul Gudgin, the director of the Fringe, yesterday said better transport, better marketing and an attempt to change ingrained perceptions in Scotland's biggest city are needed to increase ticket sales to those in the west.

The Herald understands that this year First ScotRail is to broaden its annual festival train service, with more trains and times extended into the early hours during August - trains will run at midnight during the week and later at weekends.

However, Mr Gudgin maintains transport is the main reason more Glaswegians do not make the trip to Edinburgh to visit the Fringe and the other August festivals.

He said he is now open to offers from a business which would like to open up a new Fringe transport service to bring cultural tourists to the capital.

"Transport is undoubtedly the biggest issue to solve, " he said. "The Fringe has to find a way of doing it and we have looked seriously at a prebooked bus system, a new way of getting people back to their homes, not only going to Glasgow but the Dundee and Falkirk areas as well.

"To make it work we either need more funds so we can undertake it orwe need to find the right transport partner.

"We would start small and then see how it goes but it would have to be a pre-book system. We could not have hundreds of people waiting for a 50-seat bus.

"At present, people from Glasgow cannot really go and see a show that starts beyond 10pm because they are in danger of missing the last train."

The last audience survey carried out for the Fringe shows the relative lack of visitors from the west.

The survey, of a selection of 1600 people in the capital for the Fringe, found 30per cent from Edinburgh and the Lothians, 39per cent from the rest of Britain excluding Glasgow, and 22per cent from foreign countries, mainly the US, Eire and Australia. Visitors from Glasgow numbered only 4per cent. The rest of Scotland accounted for 5per cent of the sampled visitors.

Last year, the Fringe sold 1,338,550 tickets - the third consecutive year that it has sailed past the million-ticket barrier. However, it appears that only a minority were sold to people at the end of the M8 corridor.

"The Glasgow audience has huge potential but the Fringe needs help with both increased marketing and the transport issues, " Mr Gudgin said.

"Pitching an event to an entire city is hard. It's hard enough getting a toehold in your own city and we will need some imaginative solutions.

"In a sense it is perfect for the Fringe - it is an entrepreneurial opportunity and somebody needs to seize it. We know an audience is in Glasgow and we just need help transporting it to Edinburgh."

The Fringe is only one of 11 festivals in the capital which recently released the Thundering Hooves report, warning of increasingly close competition from new cultural festivals in England, America and the Far East. In particular, Edinburgh faces rivals in Manchester, Newcastle/Gateshead and Liverpool. An increase in custom from Glasgow would only strengthen Edinburgh's position as the leading arts festival city in the world.

"We all need to take a broader look at how the festivals are marketed in the west of Scotland, " Mr Gudgin said.

"We sell only around 4per cent to 6per cent of tickets to Glaswegians and so we are obviously not doing as good a job as we can. However, the hardest thing to change is attitudes.

"Maybe people either go to festivals on their doorstep or they travel great distances. Perhaps in the case of Glasgow, it is so near, yet so far."