Last week I went to a Posh Picnic on the beach at Port Mulgrave on the Yorkshire Coast. Sunny but cold, and not the obvious thing to do in December. It was fantastic!

 I spend a lot of time advising clients to focus on local distinctiveness and what makes their place special. We know that visitors look for authenticity, love new experiences and getting an insight into other people's lives. They enjoy meeting locals who have a real passion for their area and true inside knowledge. And yet, very few places really offer this. 

Sean & Tricia Hutchinson and their sons Luke and Thomas run Real Staithes, which is the best example I've ever found of a family-run business offering visitors chances to create magical memories and giving them stories to talk about. 

They greet their visitors in a hidden location that only insiders are likely to know about and take them to their hut on a secret shoreline. Visitors are plied with fresh lobsters, mulled wine, delicious cake, and cheese and given an insight into another world. Sean talks fishing and wildlife, pointing out the Peregrine Falcon and Roe Deer that most of us would never normally notice, Tricia shows visitors how to make paints and dyes out of natural products found along the beach. Luke and Thomas scramble on the cliffs and foreshore, bringing back what look like balls of mud, but which turn out to be marvellous fossils. It's all very home-spun, natural, and friendly. Participants can't help but get caught up in Sean and Tricia's enthusiasm for the local area. 

Since I've been back, I've shown countless friends the four fossils I found, the photographs of the lobsters and the hut - this is exactly the kind of experience many visitors look for but never find. 

So many people profess to love the place where they live but so few actually manage to pass on that passion. It's great to see Real Staithes doing it so well. Some people shout about what they do, but somehow fail to do it properly. Others like the Hutchinson family just quietly get on with it, showing us all the way. Take a look at their website: they could even solve that last minute present problem with a gift voucher!

Bread and water may not sound like the most obvious tourism offering from Switzerland but that’s exactly what one company offers. Not sure why, but I like it!

Called "breadandwater", it’s a great example of someone spotting a trend, and offering an unusual product to take advantage of that trend.

In essence, they offer a “get away from it all” experience for anyone who is burnt out or needs to escape for a while and who wants to get closer to nature and experience rural Swiss life at firsthand. The very basic accommodation they offer (ranging from an old cow byre to semi-derelict mountain huts) isn’t presented just as a cheap option but as a more authentic way of experiencing the countryside. Facilities are very basic, more akin to camping.

They also have another unusual idea. If you want to stay somewhere a little more comfortable, you can rent a temporary room in an old folks home (no age limit) which presumably generates income for the home and gives the residents some one new to talk to, with the guest benefitting from plenty of local knowledge from people who really know the area.

I think this is an idea that will grow and grow... It’s appealing in so many different ways – the sense of community, sustainability, quirkiness of it. We keep hearing about things like “grass roots sustainable development”, “climate change”, “peak oil” and so on but for most of us such terms are pretty indigestible. The problems seem so big, it's hard to know what to do about them. So we don't do anything.

But a couple of years ago Pam Warhurst and friends got cracking to make some real changes in the Pennine town of Todmorden. The idea was simple: to grow food wherever they could and invite any one who wanted to pick and eat it to do so. When I say grow it anywhere, I mean it. They planted seeds on waste ground, in pots outside places like the police station, in tubs in unloved corners where normally only weeds grow. Schools got involved, as have many community groups and social landlords. There are now many other associated activities and events. Todmorden has reinvented itself. The former textile town is changing, becoming increasingly upbeat and aware that it can take charge of its own destiny.

Todmorden Incredible Edible continues to grow with a “community driven programme of action around the three centres of community, learning and business”. What makes it work is that it didn’t start with that long description: it began in a simple, grass roots way with a couple of busy women and a handful of seeds.

Visitors now have a real reason to go to Todmorden, to see what's happening, with representatives from other towns visiting to see how they could replicate the idea in their own place. There are other forms of "vegetable tourism", places you can go to see where heirloom vegetables are grown but this version is fresh, fearless and fast-growing.

I think we spend too long commissioning strategies, deliberating about structure and format and vision statements. Why not take a small risk by doing something and seeing what happens, then maybe tweaking as you go? Or procrastinate just a little by taking a trip to Todmorden to see what they’ve achieved in just a couple of years.