Before it went to auction this month, a pocket watch gifted to Arthur Rostron, captain of RMS Carpathia, the ship that rescued more than 700 passengers and crew from the Titanic, was tipped to sell for £120,000.But the 18-carat gold piece, which was presented to Rostron by three survivors of the doomed ship, who had lost their wealthy husbands in the disaster, beat all expectations. It sold for £1.56 million, the highest price yet paid for a piece of Titanic memorabilia.Judith Owens MBE winces when she thinks of the value. For the three months before the auction, the watch was on display at Titanic Belfast, the museum dedicated to the ship’s captivating story.“I asked what we insured it for and let’s just say it was a lot less than the £1.56 million it sold for,” says Owens, chief executive of the Northern Ireland visitor attraction and head of TBL International, the management company behind it. The sale, however, ultimately left her smiling. “It just shows the enduring power of the Titanic,” she says. More than a century after the White Star Line ship struck an iceberg and sank, killing more than 1,500 people, interest shows no sign of abating. AdvertisementTitanic Belfast, which opened in 2012, has become the biggest visitor attraction in Northern Ireland. It is set to welcome more than 820,000 visitors this year, making it the busiest of its 12-year history. A 2022 report by Deloitte on behalf of Titanic Belfast said that the attraction generated £430 million in direct spend to the Northern Ireland economy in the first ten years of its operation. “Two in five people come to Belfast to visit Titanic Belfast,” Owens says. “I see ourselves as one of the leaders within the Northern Ireland tourism industry. And therefore we have a responsibility to collaborate and try to drive economic return.”Owens is speaking from her windowless office to the rear of Titanic Belfast, an Eric Kuhne-designed building that resembles a ship. The structure has become synonymous with Northern Ireland, and its image is used in marketing material for worldwide distribution. It was even the starting point of the Giro d’Italia bike race in 2014.You’d imagine that as a business venture, though, that Titanic Belfast is a one-trick pony with little room to grow its revenue. On the contrary, Owens says. “We have quite a big playground here. Not only do we have a big building, we have the slipways, we have the hotel [in what was once the former offices of Harland & Wolff, the shipbuilder that constructed the Titanic].”Athough the building in which Titanic Belfast sits is ultimately owned by the charitable Maritime Belfast Trust, the company operating the museum is owned by the developer Pat Doherty, of Harcourt Developments, and his family. AdvertisementDoherty and the businessman Dermot Desmond are behind the transformation of Queen’s Island on the shores of Belfast Lough, now better known as the Titanic Quarter. The 30-year regeneration project will involve the construction of nearly 400,000 sq m of commercial, residential and media and tourism projects. Already it has resulted in the construction of a convention centre, offices, the hotel, apartments and Titanic Studios, where the hit television series Game of Thrones was filmed for 11 years. The building in which Titanic Belfast sits was constructed as part of a public-private partnership and given back to the Maritime Belfast Trust. Harcourt Developments was awarded a 25-year operational contract, through TBL. “We have the freedom to operate it commercially. I always like to say that we are a commercial organisation with a big heart,” Owens says. Titanic Belfast recorded pre-tax profits of £1.59 million and revenues of about £14 million in the year to the end of March 2023. That year it employed on average 364 people. About 70 per cent of revenues at Titanic Belfast come from the visitor attraction side of the business. The remaining 30 per cent of the receipts are derived from conferencing, banqueting and retail. Last week, for example, the building hosted Belfast Met graduations.AdvertisementThe company is constantly looking for ways to evolve, according to Owens. In recent years it has introduced discovery tours, where a tour guide brings guests out into the open of Titanic Quarter and over to the nearby Titanic Hotel Belfast, which still holds some of the original Harland & Wolff offices. Owens oversaw the introduction of SS Nomadic, the last remaining ship in the White Star Line fleet, into the TBL portfolio. It is another revenue stream. She describes Doherty, a prolific developer and businessman, as a “visionary”. He is not involved in the day-to-day running of the museum but will contribute his views to any refurbishment programmes. Most recently, TBL invested £4.7 million in turning three galleries at Titanic Belfast into four under a theme of Pursuit of Dreams. It used AI and lighting design to create an immersive experience, suspending a 10m, slowly rotating steel replica of the Titanic from the ceiling. “We have a Gallery Refreshment Fund where we set aside money every year, and together with the Maritime Belfast Trust, who own the building, we basically accumulate that money and we invest it on gallery refreshment,” Owens says. AdvertisementAs part of its latest programme, it also introduced 19 important artefacts to the galleries. “I’m a great believer in that you don’t use technology for the sake of being the first to use technology. You use it to help you tell your story, and the success of Titanic Belfast is in the human stories,” Owens says. She points to the Wallace Hartley violin — sold in 2013 for £900,000 and one of the 19 artefacts lent to the museum last year.Hartley was the bandmaster on the Titanic who gathered all the musicians together and played with them until the ship went down. He then strapped the violin to his body in a leather valise. It was later recovered and sent back to his family.“Also with the violin is a little memorial card, which sat on Hartley’s fiancée’s fireplace until she died. Artefacts like that bring you closer to the fact that this was a human story,” Owens says. “Every time you scratch the surface, there are these powerful stories.”AdvertisementOwens has her own story. An only child, she was born the year the Troubles started and raised in Holywood, a town just outside the city. Her father was a general manager at Harland & Wolff for many years before joining the consultancy firm PwC. He died when she was 30. Her mother, who is still alive, was a stay-at-home mother and still lives in Holywood. Owens says she was very much protected by her parents from the Troubles. She attended Sullivan Upper School, an interdominational school, from which she graduated at the age of 16 with four O-levels. It wasn’t until she was 28 that she would return to college to do a higher national diploma in business and finance.“I had to go back purely because I wasn’t getting the positions I wanted because I didn’t have a third-level qualification,” Owens says.In the meantime, she had various jobs, among them working on the reception at UTV and in the Belfast Telegraph. She joined the Waterfront Hall in Belfast shortly after it opened its doors in 1997. The 2,000-plus seat auditorium heralded a new start for the city, ahead of the Good Friday agreement in 1998. Owens recalls how big a deal it was when 600 members of the British Medical Association attended an annual conference in the Waterfront — the association’s first time returning to Belfast in 37 years. “I feel that I’ve seen and I’ve lived through some difficult times, but I’ve also lived through some exciting times. The opening of the Waterfront Hall was an incredible milestone,” she says. Owens joined Titanic Belfast five months before it opened in 2012. She was the operations director while Tim Husbands, who these days runs Leopardstown Racecourse and Golf Centre, was the chief executive. She was appointed chief executive in late 2016. Her role has involved welcoming many dignitaries to Titanic Belfast over the years, including King Charles and Queen Camilla, when he was still the Prince of Wales; the Duke and Duchess of Sussex; and Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state in the US government at the time of her visit in 2012. “Titanic Belfast has become iconic to Belfast. And therefore when things happen, they tend to happen here,” Owens says. The company’s social media profiles are peppered with celebrities who have just popped by, including the film director Neil Jordan, the actor Gerard Butler and Martin Keown, the former Arsenal defender. A few years ago the company realised it was missing a trick with social media — visitors only ever posted photos of the outside of the building. “Now you’ll find on social media there’s much more imagery of inside our building, because we have made it really Instagrammable,” Owens says. Last year the company won an award for best “re-envisioned visitor experience” at the Themed Entertainment Association’s awards in Los Angeles, the Oscars of the attractions industry.“We were up against the Disneys and Universals of this world, and our marketing budget is tight enough. We are very fortunate that we also work with national marketing agencies such as Tourism Northern Ireland, Tourism Ireland and Visit Belfast,” Owens says. In January 2022, Owens appeared on the new year’s honours list for her contribution to tourism in Northern Ireland. She is modest about the title but she says she did enjoy having lunch with the late Queen Elizabeth II. The Wallace Hartley violin helps bring people in to the heartrending story of the Titanic, belowALAMYTitanic Belfast was one of the founding members of the Northern Ireland Tourism Alliance.“During Covid, it was really important that leaders within tourism really got together to lobby. We didn’t have a working executive at the time either. Therefore, it was just really important that some of us put our best foot forward and made sure that we were representing our industry well,” Owens says. Post-Covid, the tourism industry is still battling to stay afloat. “My counterparts in the south would say that they’re very hard done by [with] the 13.5 per cent VAT rate, but we’re operating with a 20 per cent VAT business rate and the UK budget that has just been announced is really going to be challenging for our businesses,” Owens says. The UK budget, introduced by the chancellor Rachel Reeves in October, increased employers’ national insurance contributions and raised minimum wages.“It has taken us by surprise in terms of our planning next year,” Owens adds. “We need to be very careful that we don’t outprice an industry. But that is difficult to do when you have got rising statutory costs.”For now, though, Titanic Belfast looks unsinkable. Santa arrives there today. Christmas afternoon tea will be available in one of the galleries, and corporate events will continue to run right up until Christmas. “While this period is very much about planning for the next three years, the high seasons have really started to stretch into the shoulder seasons,” Owens says. “I would like to do more events in the public space, and to host more homespun events. I want Titanic Belfast to be an iconic beacon for tourism in Belfast and Northern Ireland.” Alfred Hitchcock’s film adaptation of Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, is a favourite film of OwensALAMYThe life of Judith OwensAge: 55Lives: BelfastFamily: partner, David, of 30 years and daughter, Grace, 23Education: Sullivan Upper School; higher national diploma in business and financeFavourite films: “The 1940s adaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, starring Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier, or Out of Africa, starring Meryl Streep, my favourite actress”Favourite book: any book by Jo Spain, the Dublin thriller writerWorking day: If I’m in the office I normally stay from 8am to 6pm but have industry events to attend about twice a week in the evening, and I am normally in at the weekends meeting with clients and welcoming VIPs. I also have two or three speaking engagements a month representing Titanic Belfast or Northern Ireland Tourism Alliance and I travel extensively, meeting with in-market operators and attending industry conferences. The phone is always on, and when you are a CEO, you are never really off duty.Downtime: I go to the gym about twice a week. I also adore cooking. It doesn’t matter what time of night I come home at, we will cook fresh, local produce. That is my real escapism.
