National flags celebrating the Olympics Games adorn Regent Street, one of the main shopping streets in London's West End. Provided to China Daily

After Olympics, british tourism chiefs begin new campaign

The London Olympics are forecast to have a positive long-term impact on British tourism, despite their failure to attract an immediate surge of visitors to London.

As tourism chiefs analyze the impact of the Games, the British government has stepped up efforts to attract Chinese tourists with an 8 million pound ($12.54 million, 10.17 million euros) marketing campaign for the Chinese market.

"Nobody should underestimate the opportunity China and its cities represent," says Britain's Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who announced the initiative on Aug 14.

The funding will be used to give a fillip in the Chinese market to the British government's Great campaign, a four-year global project to promote Britain's image with an initial budget of 100 million pounds.

Hunt said the goal of the extra funding is to increase the annual number of Chinese visitors to Britain from 150,000 now to 500,000 by 2015.

"We'll also be looking at improvements to the visa system and work with airlines and aviation authorities to improve the number of flight connections to China," Hunt said.

China is the only international market to receive extra funding, and Britain's domestic market received 2 million pounds, Hunt announced.

Many tour operators have struggled to capture financial gains during the Olympic period.

The number of bookings with Omega Travel Group, Europe's largest travel agency by number of Chinese customers, dropped around Games time.

The European Tour Operators Association said tourist numbers had fallen "dramatically" in the first few days of the Games.

"We were aware of changing patterns of tourism during the Olympic Games, so we were expecting roughly the same number of Chinese visitors, but in fact tour bookings have dropped, especially for tours outside London," an Omega representative says.

From January to August, Omega says, it has experienced a drop of about 40 percent in Chinese customer numbers compared with last year.

"A large portion of our customers are international students and their parents, therefore we tend to be quite busy during summer holidays, but they may have stayed away this year believing the UK would be crowded during the Olympics."

Omega says it believes another reason tourists have stayed away is because London's transport authority issued warnings about large crowds, urging commuters to vary journeys, take alternative routes or use other means of transport.

This was done as London transport authorities forecast an extra 3 million journeys a day during the Games on top of the usual 12 million, an Olympian test for an underground train network that opened in 1863 during the reign of Queen Victoria.

"We're welcoming more than 1 million people a day," recordings at bus stops and underground stations blared. "There is going to be huge pressure on the transport network."

The message seems to have worked. Commuters and tourists alike were impressed by London's orderly transport network despite a few minor underground signal failures, but retailers suffered as many regular tourists stayed away and Londoners took holidays abroad to avoid the Olympics.

Lastminute.com, an online travel and leisure retailer with its headquarters in London, experienced a 207 percent rise in outbound holiday bookings from July 27 to Aug 12 compared with last year. Popular destinations included Spain, Crete in Greece, Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt and Morocco.

The number of visitors to high street shops in London is reported to have fallen sharply, especially in the first week of the Olympics. The Research group Experian says foot traffic in west London retail centers fell 12.4 percent year-on-year on the first Saturday of the Games.

But Hunt said the warning messages were needed to ensure London's transport system ran smoothly.

"We were absolutely right to give out the message to make sure we could cope with (an increased amount of traffic)," he said.

However, he has acknowledged that the Olympics started with a period where there were fewer pedestrians, especially in the West End.

"We did have slightly quieter periods in the first week, and that happened in the Sydney Olympics (in 2000) as well, but in the second week we were reporting record numbers. So this has been a brilliant fortnight for all London businesses," Hunt said.

Following claims in the media in the first few days of the Games that London had turned into a ghost town, the prime minister, David Cameron, urged people to "come back into the capital".

His plea seems to have worked, with retailers in and around Oxford Street reporting an increase in sales and a higher footfall in the days after his remarks.

A survey by Heart of London, a business alliance representing central London's shopping district, said footfall from Aug 5 to 8 rose 11.6 percent on the previous week and 16.2 percent on the same week last year.

"Tourists who bought tickets to see the Olympics in its first week did more shopping and sightseeing in the second week," says Jace Tyrrell of the New West End Company, an alliance that represents 600 businesses in London's West End.

As the Olympic Park is located in London's East End, some West End businesses had a quieter time. "We've had a difficult first week, but the overall impact of the Olympics on West End businesses is neutral," Tyrrell says.

He agrees that the government's warning messages about the capital's overstretched transport system contributed to the lack of shoppers in the West End initially, although he says such warnings were understandable.

"London was preparing for the biggest event in the world. But after the opening ceremony, people realized it was easy to get to the West End using London's transport."

Tyrrell says upmarket stores such as Selfridges did well to cash in on Asian shoppers' demand. Olympic merchandise also sold well, including at many small souvenir stores in Oxford Street and Regent Street.

Another sector that benefited directly from the Olympics was London's hotels. The data provider STR Global says hoteliers across London reported 87.7 percent occupancy from July 27 to Aug 5, an increase of 3.2 percent on last year.

More strikingly, the average room rate of 216 pounds over the same period represented an 87.1 percent increase from last year.

Tourism industry leaders are expecting longer-term gains from the Games.

"The millions of Chinese people watching the Olympics on television would benefit London greatly," Tyrell says. "The overall impact would be a big boost."

The think tank Oxford Economics had forecast that 650 million pounds in tourist spending was likely to be generated during the five years after the Games.

Miles Quest, a spokesman for the British Hospitality Association, told the London magazine Conference & Incentive Travel that the tourism industry should return to healthy levels in the coming months.

"I think come September and October the business pattern would swing back into action and there would be much stronger business and corporate demand."

With last year's royal wedding and the Queen's diamond jubilee this year, the Olympics has helped Britain's tourism industry to gain a younger and more vibrant image.

"Britain, which is never seen as a romantic destination, is now being heavily pictured as a honeymoon destination for the Chinese," says Patricia Yates, director of strategy and communications of Visit Britain, the government tourism promotion agency.

Yates says the image of Britain for overseas tourists has changed rapidly over the past year, starting with the royal wedding. "The royals, young, in love, fashion, all that sort of British creativity, it looked beautiful."

The royal wedding also brought Britain a lot of international media coverage, equivalent to 3 billion pounds of advertising influence, Yates says.

She says she expects more people to come after the Olympics as the Games attracted billions of viewers and extensive media coverage worldwide.

"Tourism delivery happens post-Games; people want to experience Britain as they see it on the screen," she says, adding that the tourism boost will last five to 10 years, going by the experience of other host cities.

Contact the writers at cecily.liu@chinadaily.com.cn and diaoying@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 08/17/2012 page19)