Foreign spend in Britain booms

INTERNATIONAL visitors have spent an extra £2.5 billion in Britain during the last four years, says VisitBritain. 

This beats the target set for it by the UK Government in 2011 by more than half a billion pounds, and means that every £1 invested in VisitBritain’s activities has resulted in an overseas visitor spending £21. 

VisitBritain has delivered an additional £630 million, thanks to its role as a partner in the cross-UK Government GREAT campaign.

Overall inbound tourism, Britain’s third largest service export and one of its fastest-growing, was worth more than £26 billion to the UK economy in 2013. The industry is also a major job creator; every 22 additional Chinese visitors create an additional job in the sector.

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Flight booking data reveals impact of Tunisia terrorist attack

THE full extent of the slump in flight bookings and cancellations to #Tunisia after two major terrorist attacks this year is revealed in data published by ForwardKeys, which monitors #travel patterns by analyzing 14 million reservation transactions each day. 

The analysis shows that weekly international bookings fell by 44.7% compared with the same period in 2014 following the museum attack in Tunis on March 18. Bookings fell by 42.2% after the beach massacre near Sousse on June 26, which killed 38 tourists including 30 British holidaymakers. 

The attacks prompted a fall in bookings across a range of countries. The most marked slumps were seen in Switzerland, which recorded more cancellations than bookings.

ForwardKeys co-founder and chief executive Olivier Jager, said: ‘Our data shows that international bookings to Tunisia have been under-performing since mid-2014. Obviously the two terrorist attacks in the first half of 2015 have made the situation considerably worse.’

Major operators cancelled programmes to Tunisia for the rest of this year and summer 2016 after the British Government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office warned against all but essential travel to Tunisia in the wake of the Sousse attack.

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Picture Credit: "Skopje Airport Check-in" by Janicka - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Skopje_Airport_Check-in.jpg#/media/File:Skopje_Airport_Check-in.jpg