A reborn market begins at home
There's still a lot of tourism income right under our noses in the UK, says Bob Cotton.
Suddenly, the talk in the industry is all about uncertainty. Three major events this year - the foot-and-mouth outbreak, the beginnings of an economic recession and repercussions from the terrorist outrage in New York - have hit the UK industry's confidence hard.
We have to recognise that the world of tourism has changed, perhaps for good. The upward graph of international travel, which has been such a factor for the past five decades, has already lost momentum for the UK, as British Tourist Authority figures show.
But all is by no means lost. For the UK, the North Atlantic market is worth £2.5b, about one-fifth of all our overseas earnings. Yet the British spend more than £20b travelling on holiday abroad, while the domestic market is worth some £16b to the hospitality industry alone.
We need to put the potential loss into perspective. Compared with the size of the home market and the spend of British people overseas, the drop in overseas revenue, though serious, is relatively small, hitting hardest the hotels in London and the major tourist towns such as Bath, Chester, Stratford and York, which depend more on North Atlantic traffic.
The answer for these key destinations, and for the UK hospitality industry at large, must surely be to refocus our marketing strategies on Europe and to persuade more Britons to holiday at home.
Already, many of the largest hotel companies have done this. However, what is lacking in England is an organisation to co-ordinate a nationwide campaign to boost the home market next year and beyond.
Devolution has helped Scotland and Wales in this respect, because both countries have control over their own tourism destiny. In England, the English Tourism Council has neither the resources nor the funds for any co-ordinated campaign. This is a grave shortcoming in the country's tourism organisational structure.
The recently announced Tourism Alliance is a welcome step in the right direction for the industry, bringing together - for the first time - all the major tourism interests in one body.
But what we need now is action by the Government. And we need significant funding so that England itself can be promoted to British people rather than to markets overseas, which will, in the present circumstances, be impervious to our messages.
Many people in the tourism, hospitality and leisure industry will remember clearly the difficult experiences of the early 1990s. Ten years later, the situation is different. If we can refocus our energies on the market on our own doorstep, and continue investment in our properties and staff, the industry will survive this downturn and prosper again.
Bob Cotton is chief executive of the British Hospitality Association
