Tourism is an often undermined business in Government eyes – as it ever was…..
We are on our 5th Tourism Minister in a year so not surprising they don’t spend much time learning about our value – yet in 2022 we generated £ 26 billion to the UK economy, employed hundreds of thousands of staff and we continue to face major issues.
Every tourism related company lost staff during COVID and they are not returning to the industry. We were already losing thousands of London based staff to Europe because of Brexit. There have never been as many vacancies in tourism as this year – despite huge increases in salaries, (a welcome increase of 10 – 20% since the pandemic), business running costs and increased operational costs.
The Government is not supporting us – failing to overturn the VAT reclaiming scheme for international visitors (all credible reports show this is not an income loss to the country but a huge boost and all our major UK & Ireland cities are losing thousands of high spending tourists going to Europe instead (if shopping tourist aren’t coming here we suffer losses in our hotels, attractions, restaurants ,entertainment and transport companies), VISA issues (our UK coats and delays compared to our European friends) – we rely heavily on our fantastic trade associations for their constant lobbying efforts – thank you CTA, UKInbound & ETOA for all their help along with the associations they join with to lobby on our behalf.
