Tourism’s ‘mission critical’ message needs highlighting to politicians
Wednesday, 05 Nov, 2009
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TravelMole Guest Comment by VisitBritain strategy and communications director Patricia Yates
The world’s travel buyers are arriving in London for World Travel Market, an amazing showcase for the variety of experiences that tourism offers around the world.
VisitBritain and its partners across the industry will mark the occasion by highlighting tourism’s assets and its huge contribution to the cultural and economic fabric of this country.
This year has been a relatively good year for inbound tourism to Britain.
The exchange rate has made us able to promote a good value message around the world – and we have bucked the trend with a 4% increase in leisure visits while the business market remains challenging with a decline of over 20%.
And our domestic market has been strong this year with domestic holidays up by 18% in the first seven months of 2009.
Tourism is a major driver of the world’s economy and yet still finds it difficult in many developed nations to be seen for the powerhouse that it is – and the potential for growth that it offers fully realised.
In Britain tourism is our fifth largest industry, sustaining 2.7 million people in a job, contributing over 8% of our GDP, and supporting 200,000 small and medium-sized enterprises.
The challenge for tourism now is to show politicians how it is mission critical for success – success in showing competent mastery of the economy and success in backing service industries that can emerge strongly though the recession and deliver employment.
Tourism has a compelling case to make in its ability to create jobs across the country in every constituency, at entry level to get people into employment, and in a ripple effect that spreads from tourism businesses to companies that work to support them.
The Deloitte report on tourism launched earlier this year concluded that new jobs would only be created with increased investment in marketing tourism at home and abroad to generate consumer demand.
Taking a more proactive approach to the development of the UK visitor economy could allow the UK to sustain its share of inbound tourism.
This would result in just over 49m overseas visitors coming to the UK every year by 2018, (around 32million came last year) creating over 50,000 jobs.
This is the moment for tourism to shine a light on all it delivers and its potential for growth.
We have a window of opportunity to make our case as all the political parties review their policies in the light of an imminent election.
For this we need to work together to make a clear and compelling case that is shared across all the industry and used consistently so that we become impossible to ignore.
Can we do this? Well in the words of a recent successful election candidate ‘yes we can’.
Phil Davies
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