European Cities the Key to Economic Recovery

Just met with the Executive Director of the ETOA (European Tour Operators Association) who was telling me all about their new headline event, the forthcoming City Fair 2011.

The City Fair is held in London and will bring together, under one roof in one day, City destinations from across Europe, their suppliers and buyers from both long haul and European markets.

The City tourism sector is a core element of all European tourism, a driver for long-haul originating markets and a motor of European economic recovery in 2011.

All of the European touring programmes, promoted and marketed by long-haul originating markets (Asia, North America, Australasia, South America) are designed and fleshed around a 'skelton' of itineraries with key european cities as their fundamental building blocks. As an vital element in developing their tourism products and securing new visitor growth, it is important for cities to be recognised for inclusion into this 'touring skeleton'.

New and up-coming cities can see their visitor numbers transformed by the simple selling of their destinations while established cities must ensure their continued inclusion by steady marketing, promotion and control on their ARR (Average Room Rate).

CityFair gives these cities a tremendous opportunity to showcase their services while buyers can source new product and develop existing destinations

The event is organised by ETOA in conjunction with European Cities Marketing (ECM) and brings together their expertise in city tourism with ETOA’s long track record of running workshops.

Full details can be found at FESM/CityFair2011

Low Cost to Amman, Jordan

I had lunch last week with a friend who was telling me about how BMI operated their new LON-TRIPOLI service the VERY SAME day that protests broke out in Tripoli and Benghazi - they only flew one rotation..

And so it's interesting to see that easyJet has just started a three time a week service from Gatwick to Amman, Jordan! With the new service, easyJet is breaking ground by becoming Britain’s first low-cost carrier flying to an Arab capital.

I had the opportunity to visit Jordan a couple of years ago and there is a lot to see there including The Treasury at Petra, the Wadi Rum desert, sailing in Aqaba and the stunning Roman ruins in Jerash, to name just a few.

easyJet will operate three weekly services to Amman from Gatwick, departing on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 12:50pm, arriving at Amman’s Queen Alia International Airport the same day at 8pm. Meanwhile, the return flight to Gatwick departs Amman at 8:45pm, arriving at Gatwick at 12.20am.

Jordan Tourism Board’s airport office supervisor, Nader Al-Shakhatreh, confirmed on on Saturday, March 26, 2011, that easyJet is indeed scheduled to land at the Queen Alia International Airport. He said: "We are expecting some 34 plus people to come from the UK to be part of the first flight from London.”

Jordan Tourism Board has said that the new route is being launched with a very high profile familiarization and press trip to Jordan on the inaugural flight in both directions. The JTB said: “They are planning to bring around 40 people. This will be made up of travel, business journalists, senior easyJet management and CEO and potentially a number of UK tour operators. This is the first time easyJet has ever launched a route in this way and is seeking support and advice from the JTB.”

Being that the UK accounts for a big chunk of Jordan's international visitors, the easyJet service could easily provide the necessary boost to offset the 25% drop caused by “regional unrest” that Jordan Tourism Board director Nayef Fayez has predicted earlier this year.

Reported figures claim that Jordan’s tourism industry generated an estimated US$1 billion in revenue in 2010. UK played an integral part in this achievement by becoming Jordan’s second biggest European market, followed by France.

The challenge then for Jordan’s tourism industry with the influx of budget tourists from the UK will then be accommodation, as Amman, in particular, is very much associated as a luxury tourist destination that offers high-end accommodation.

Meanwhile, Royal Jordanian, Jordan’s flag carrier which services the Heathrow to Amman route, welcomes the fact that easyJet is now offering a low-cost carrier option for London to Amman travelers and vice versa. “As far as I am concerned, it is great. It is another airline flying to Jordan,” Royal Jordanian CEO Hussein H. Dabbas.

According to the Royal Jordanian CEO, he isn’t worried about easyJet that much. He said: “My competition is more bmi [British Midland International], which flies daily from Heathrow to Amman. I have been flying to London for over 40 years. I am operating A330s with two classes of service, videos on demand in every seat. I provide amenities and food and so on.”

Mr. Dabbas also said: “This [easyJet] is a low-cost carrier coming in to Jordan, and we have no problem with that. On the contrary, it will create a new market segment. It’s the longest LCC route because we are talking about five and half hours [of flying] from London to Amman. So, people are going to buy food, buy water, pay for pillows, and so on. And I think this is very healthy to have competition.”

One-way fares for the Gatwick to Amman flights start at 64.99 to 363.99 euros, depending of course on the date of travel with weekdays being a lot more inexpensive than weekend travels.

London 2012 - There'll be trouble ahead...

......Another View of London 2012

As happens in nearly all Olympic destinations, demand is suppressed during the year of the event. Regular bookings are drying up and the volume of enquiries is down. According to a survey of BIM attendees, demand for 2012 is 20% on 2011.

Demand is reduced, but the industry is unable to meet even reduced levels of demand as there is a dramatic reduction in availability.

The London hotels remain confident that 2012 is going to be a bonanza. This is founded on high rate demand in 2009 and 2010, with solid demand in the summer months. For the Olympics in particular they see: 55,000 room reservations placed by LOCOG; additional requests for accommodation from foreign Olympic Operators; estimates of foreign visitor numbers of 200,000 per night and expectations of massive domestic demand.

In response to this, additional capacity is being added. There are new hotels, home-stay programmes and additional cruise capacity. As LOCOG have secured 40% of the rooms at below market rates, hotels are seeking to recoup their losses by increasing rates and tightening terms for the balance of the rooms. Nearly all non-Olympic business is being declined.

Outside the immediate Olympic period, there is an assumption that whatever demand that would have normally come during the first three weeks of August will be displaced into the surrounding weeks, making an already crowded time (Farnborough, the Paralympics) even more densely packed. This is reflected in higher prices throughout the summer.

Thus the main long-haul origin markets (US and Japan) are finding it impossible to secure hotel space at viable rates and terms during the Games period. Even outside the Games period, operators are facing inflated rates. As London is the gateway town for Britain and for Europe, clients need two slots to be accommodated: at the start and at the end of the trip. The closure of three weeks creates a “crater” of demand in the surrounding period. So the best product established operators can brochure is: nothing during three weeks of the peak season, reduced availability and increased prices for the balance.

This is not a sensible product to beguile flagging demand. Several operators are effectively dropping London as a tourism destination for the bulk of 2012. There is not much that can be done to reverse this. The solutions that have been canvassed (such as “the West Midlands: a viable alternative to London”) do not work. As London is removed from the product offer, the rest of the UK goes with it.

According to a survey of the attendees at the British and Ireland Marketplace, forward placements of business for London 2012 is currently running at 50% below 2011 levels.

This also means that London will cease to be a default gateway for Europe in 2012. For many markets this was happening anyway, as the UK’s position outside Schengen made it a marginal proposition. But it accentuates a trend: we have invited our regular clients to invest their business elsewhere. There is no guarantee that they will return quickly.

The irony of this situation is acute. The assumptions, both in the market and in the supplier community are wrong. The last two times the Olympic Games were held in Europe, they were accommodated in Barcelona (12,000 hotel rooms) and in Athens (15,000 hotel rooms). Neither cities burst. London has 125,000 hotel rooms, plus all the additional capacity added for August 2012.

Says Tom Jenkins, Executive Director of ETOA: “Much of this long-haul business is lost, amounting to over one million clients. That this loss has occurred because of a misperception is obviously regrettable. What matters now is to gain an understanding of exactly how the demand for the Games is manifesting itself. The people who can most help this process are the organisers who are selling tickets to the games. How many tickets are actually being sold to foreign visitors? If we have this figure then demand can be assessed. At present an industry stands in jeopardy through over-hyped fantasies of bonanza.”

2012 Olympic Sites - take your pick

It's 500 days to go before London 2012 gets under way, so here's a run down of some of the more popular venues that are going to be used.. To find more about getting tickets for the Games, check the official 2012 Olympic website.

Olympic Park, East London

Work is well under way at the Olympic Park in East London and the site includes the 80,000 seat Olympic Stadium, the Aquatics Centre and the Velodrome. If you’d like to see the site close up, you can visit on the open days from 22-24 July.

Horse Guards Parade, London
My sons favourite, Beach Volley Ball, will take place on Horse Guards Parade, just behind Downing Street.

Lord’s Cricket Ground, London
Lord’s Cricket Ground in North West London will be transformed into an Archery range for 2012. Crowds of 6,500 will enjoy the competition with two fields of play inside the stadium. You can also visit Lords to see the Ashes urn, and among other things, the stuffed sparrow ‘bowled out’ by Jahangir Khan. You can also tour players’ dressing rooms and see the famous Lord’s Honours Board.

Hyde Park, London
Hyde Park, will host the Triathlon course in 2012. Triathlon is among the fastest-growing individual sports in the UK, and thousands of people will line the route during the races. The park itself is one of the largest parks in London.

Football stadiums, UK-wide
The London 2012 Football competitions will be held at stadiums throughout the country (but not Hull!) Games will be played at Hampden Park in Glasgow; the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff; Old Trafford in Manchester; St James’ Park in Newcastle; Villa Park in Birmingham and Wembley Stadium in London, where the finals will take place.

Weymouth & Portland Harbour, Dorset
Weymouth & Portland Harbour in Dorset, on England’s South East coast, will be the venue for the 2012 Sailing and Paralympic Sailing competitions. Weymouth & Portland Harbour provides some of the best natural sailing waters in Britain and during the Games you can watch the action for free.

Lee Valley White Water Centre, Hertfordshire
The White Water Centre that will host the London 2012 Olympic canoe slalom competition opens to the public on 22 April. It’s the only brand new London 2012 venue that non-Olympic competitors will be able to use before the Games.

Wimbledon, London
Wimbledon in South East London will be used for the Tennis competition at the 2012 Games. Up to 30,000 people will be able to watch the players compete. Highlights at the club’s museum include the Championship Trophies, a 200° cinema screen and a ‘walk-through’ of the men’s dressing room as it was in the 1980s, with John McEnroe.

North Greenwich Arena, London
Otherwise known as the 'O2 Arena'. During the Games, it will seat 20,000 spectators for the Basketball final and 16,500 for the Gymnastics.

Greenwich Park, London
Greenwich Park will host the Olympic and Paralympic Equestrian competitions, plus the combined running and shooting event of the Modern Pentathlon.

I'd just like to add, that the Cycling will becoming through Surbiton (nearly) - and we are all looking forward to that!

The Million Dollar Memo - your chance to win!

Tourism Queensland is the the team that dreamed up the successful Best Job in the World campaign and they have just come up with a new weeze. The Million Dollar Memo.

This is a new campaign targeting the global incentive travel market by offering companies and workplaces around the world the opportunity to compete for AUD $1,000,000 worth of travel experiences to Queensland "Great companies are built by the great people within them, so we'd like to reward that hard work by giving one lucky company the chance to win the Ultimate Reward - AUD $1,000,000 worth of Queensland travel experiences for their staff," said Tourism Queensland CEO Anthony Hayes. "We've sent the Million Dollar Memo to thousands of companies and workplaces worldwide, inviting them to showcase their organization to a global audience by telling us why they are the best company in the world and why their employees deserve the AUD $1,000,000 worth of unique travel experiences to Queensland. To be in the running, entrants need to create an entertaining 60 second video that shows what makes their company great and why they think Queensland is the ultimate reward destination. Video entries can be submitted at www.milliondollarmemo.com.

Fancy a crack?

Gaddafi, Libya and the arms trade

As the UN Security Council give the go ahead to impose a "no fly" zone over Libya, it really is no surprise to learn that the UK has done much to help Gaddafi's forces fly and bomb in the first place.

In 2005, the UK licensed the sale of £29.5m worth of “military transport aircraft” to the colonel; and in 2009 and 2010 licensed the sale of “bombing computers” and “military aircraft ground equipment” too.

In addition, between 2005 and 2007, sales of armoured all-wheel drive vehicles, armoured personnel carriers, night vision goggles and water cannon got the go-ahead.

And some of the biggest shipments didn’t even help boost British manufacturing. In 2007 a job lot of “anti-riot shields, body armour, anti-riot guns, crowd control ammunition, smoke ammunition, tear gas/irritant ammunition, smoke hand grenades & CS hand grenades” were licensed for export to Libya by British businessmen. The materials, however, were made in Serbia.

In 2005, a £41m package of battlefield weapons, including heavy machine guns, armour for tanks, day and night sights for weapons and military image intensifier equipment, originally from the Ukraine, was also licensed.

The oddest export, however, was licensed between July and September last year when the Foreign Office approved the sale of what it describes as “spacecraft”....??

The Most Difficult Languages to Speak??

I'm proud that I can get by in a few languages, French, German, Spanish and some would say English (I'm from Yorkshire.!) - but here's a recent list I read of the most difficult languages for English speakers to get to grips with..


1. Arabic

Arabic breaks down into families. One is the Modern Standard Arabic of print, media, and online content. The other is spoken Arabic, which encompasses many colloquial dialects which vary by region. This means that if you pick up conversational Arabic in Tunisia, it might still be tough to be understood in Kuwait.

For all dialects of Arabic, pronunciation is difficult for English speakers, as many consonants are formed at the back of the mouth.

Arabic script is a phonetic, 28-symbol alphabet descending from Phonecian. Most letters change shape depending on their position in the word, and letters may or may not be joined. The most basic challenge in tackling written Arabic is in reading from right to left, working against an English speaker’s deeply embedded instinct.

Arabic grammar has very few parallels with English and Indo-European languages. The plural is expressed by changing the vowel structure of the word: kitab (book) becomes kutub (books). The bulk of verbs are irregular and can be formed 25 ways. It’s a logical grammar system, but a complicated one too.

2. Basque

In a study conducted by the British Foreign Office, Basque was ranked as the hardest language to learn. Geographically surrounded by Romance languages, it is one of the only language isolates of Europe, with no syntactic parallels to English. The regional dialects are highly diverged, though a standardized Basque is used for media and academics.

Basque is agglutinative, meaning that words are formed and modified with prefixes and suffixes. While “law” is lege in Basque, the phrase “according to the law” would be structured by suffixes as “legearen arabera.” Instead of prepositions, Basque uses cases endings to show the relationship between words, such as mendi (mountain) and mendira (to the mountain). It sounds simple, but with eleven cases, each taking four forms, the grammar is complex.

Basque is written in the Roman alphabet and pronunciation is fairly easy, even with new consonant sounds like tx or tz.

3. Cantonese

Cantonese is a tonal language, which is challenging for English speakers who are used to speaking with emphasis (“I didn’t eat YOUR sandwich!”) and inflection, rising tones to pose a question. Cantonese can be difficult even for those fluent in other Chinese dialects because of its tonal system. While Mandarin has four tones, Cantonese has eight, with pitch and contour shaping a syllable’s meaning.

Chinese has a logographic (pictoral) writing system of 5000+ characters. This presents a new hurtle to language learning, since a reader of Cantonese can’t sound out syllables in a text as we can with phonetic alphabets. They must know and recall the name of each character.


4. Finnish

Finnish is in the Finno-Ugric language family, with Estonian and Hungarian. Without Germanic or Latin influence, Finnish vocabulary is completely alien to English speakers. Its grammar is also somewhat notorious. There are fifteen noun cases, sometimes with subtle differences. Talotta means “without a house,” while talolta means “from a house.” Tricky.

There are six verb types, classed by their stems. These stems alter as the verbs are conjugated. The language is agglutinative and verbs are conjugated with a succession of suffixes.

But, Finnish is written as it sounds (in the Roman alphabet), and pronunciation is comfortable for English speakers. A common speaking problem lies in remembering single or double vowel sounds, as in tuli (fire) and tuuli (wind).

5. Hungarian

Though it uses the Roman alphabet for writing, Hungarian is tricky. Unique vowel sounds (á,é,ó,ö,ő,ú,ü,ű,í) and consonant clusters (ty, gy, ny, sz, zs, dzs, dz, ly, cs) make it difficult for English tongues to read and pronounce Hungarian.

Instead of articles, Hungarian conjugates verbs in one of two ways for definite and indefinite objects. Olvasok könyvet means “I read a book,” while Olvasom a könvyet is “I read the book.”

Because possession, tense, and number are indicated by suffixes, not word order in a sentence, Hungarian sentence structure is very loose and flexible. Sounds forgiving for a novice speaker, huh? The truth is that any sentence can take on several meanings if the suffixes are altered slightly. It’s a confusing system to learn.


6. Japanese

The good news is that pronunciation is easy. Japanese vowel and consonant sounds are familiar to those fluent in English, which makes the language easy to parrot and understand.

But written Japanese can be a headache to learn. It uses four alphabets including the Chinese-influenced kanji (pictoral), two phonetic writing systems, and the Roman alphabet (Romanji).

The notion of honorific language is challenging for learners. Japanese speech can vary with levels of politeness, with each level having set forms and rules. English has no set way of speaking honorifically or intimately, and learners may have trouble recalling when and where to use honorific speech.

Grammatically, Japanese is a mixed bag. There are only three irregular verbs and a pretty consistent structure, with verbs at the end of the sentence. Nouns carry no gender or number, though they can function as adjectives or adverbs, which can be confusing for readers.


7. Navajo

The Navajo language was used as a code by US forces in World War Two. In the Pacific battles, Japanese codebreakers cracked other allied dialects and coded language. They could never decipher Navajo.

Navajo is a verb-centred language. Even adjectives have no direct translation into Navajo; descriptions are given through verbs. It’s a prefix-heavy language, with 25 kinds of pronominal prefixes which can be stacked onto one another. This forms incredibly long phrases like chidí naaʼnaʼí beeʼeldǫǫhtsoh bikááʼ dah naaznilígíí which means “army tank.”

Another feature unique to Navajo is animacy, wherein nouns will take on certain verbs according to their rank in the hierarchy of animation. Humans and lightning are highest, children and big animals come next, and abstractions sit at the bottom. It’s a fascinating aspect of the language and culture, but a tough one to memorize and put into practice.


8. Mandarin

Written Mandarin is pictoral and contains over 20,000 characters. Some base characters, like root words, appear in other symbols, like (the character for “woman” forming part of “sister.” The written form of the language has no phonic connection to the spoken form.

Mandarin, like Cantonese, is a tonal language, and a misused inflection can change the meaning of a sentence. The syllable “ma” can mean mother or horse, depending on the inflection!

Grammatically, Mandarin is easy than some Indo-European languages. Words, for the most part, have only one grammatical form. Their function is shown through prepositions, word order and particles. Building and comprehending this syntax, however, takes time. There are some tough elements like Mandarin adverbs: a dozen words which have no direct English translation.

9. Korean

At first, the language seems far easier than other East Asian tongues. No tones! No pictoral writing system!

It’s true that reading and writing in Korean is easy to master, as the language uses the very logical Hangul phonetic written system. Speaking and listening, while tone-free, can be challenging with unique sounds that are hard for English speakers to recognize, let alone master.

The biggest challenge with Korean lies in the grammar. Verbs can be conjugated hundreds of ways, depending on tense, mood, age and seniority.

Like Japanese, one sentence can be said in three different ways, depending on the relationship between the speaker and addressee. Adjectives are conjugated too, with hundreds of possible endings. Also, there are also two different number systems, quite different from one another.

If anyone else has any suggestions, I'd like to know...what about Hindu???

Japan and the Tsunami

It's difficult to articulate the scenes we have seen coming from Japan; with rolling 24hr new coverage, we see the disaster unfolding before our eyes. Of course, Japan is no stranger to earthquakes; for nearly half ah century after the great earthquake of 1923 devastated Tokyo and the surrounding area, causing the deaths of more than 100,000 people, no new buildings were allowed of more than two or three storeys and when, in the 1960s, skyscrapers were eventually allowed, they had to be built to the most exacting standards to cope with earthquakes of the most extreme violence.

Whatever is said about the safety precautions in the construction of nuclear plants and the shaking that people experienced in the earthquake, there have been few reports of large buildings collapsing as they did in New Zealand.

But then perhaps that has tended to lull the Japanese, as it has so many people in advanced economies, west as well as east, into thinking that they had nature tamed. In the post-Second World War years of prosperity and expansion, millions moved from the villages and the fields to the cities and the suburbs.

Japanese culture remains ever-conscious of a rural past and the world of nature. Vengeful spirits and overwhelming forces is the stuff of theatre, cinema and popular art. But it is no longer preoccupies everyday life, until now.

The vast majority of people live in the cities and work at commerce, their lives filled with the sounds of the modern world and the electronic gadgets. Japanese culture is now an urban one and a modern one, just as is happening now in China. No more than in Europe or America does the rhythm of life allow for major disasters where the power of Man and his machines is made to look puny. That is going to be a shock to Japanese society once it recovers from this catastrophe.

Nearly every reporter has commented on the orderliness and apparent calm with which most Japanese reacted to biggest seismic shock for a century. That is no doubt a tribute to the training every child and citizen undergoes for just such an emergency. But it is too easy to confuse that with a spirit of obedience in the populace.

The earthquake and tsunami have struck after nearly a generation of economic stagnation and political paralysis. Japan has had five prime ministers in four years and a change in government two years ago has brought little sense of change or new ideas. The Prime Minister, Naoto Kan, is widely dismissed. The government's standing has been dented by a series of corruption scandals. If it wasn't for the growth of the Chinese market, the resilience of its manufacturing industry and a propensity of its citizens to save, Japan would be on the list for the next crisis in the financial markets. Voters don't expect the system, or the politics, to open up in the foreseeable future.

The fact that Japan's population has borne this situation so patiently to date is less as a consequence of obedience than because there has been no great reason for uproar. The country is wealthy and cohesive enough to maintain a relatively high standard of living, with few external pressures. There is, and always has been, in Japan an overiding sense of fatalism about life, which induces resignation and political passivity.

It is hard to believe that a catastrophe of this magnitude will have no effect on the society and politics. Anyone who knows the way Japan revived after the Second World War and became such an unstoppable success in the 1960s, or who witnessed the way it responded to the oil shocks of the 1970s, can doubt the determination and the ability of the country to pull itself round.

Tsunami in Japan

Incredible footage of the Tsunami as it hits the coast of Japan.

New Government Tourism Strategy - A rant

The new Government Tourism Strategy proposals were published last week and have been met with mass indifference all round.

The problem is it that it fails both the outbound and inbound sectors at the same time by not addressing the tax issues intrinsic in both. Instead of cutting sky-high taxes such as VAT and air passenger duties, which are putting visitors off coming here, ministers instead chose to tinker with bank holiday dates.

Ok, so they said they would move the Bank Holiday (Hurrah) and that we would see and enjoy the benefit from increased traffic due to the Olympics (Mmm, not sure about that one), but the Government's report, while acknowledging the calls for lower taxes, says that, while it will keep the matter under review, "the financial position we inherited means we must give priority to our fiscal base".

In other words, we'll keep VAT and all the other taxes just as they are!

In a nutshell, VAT, APD and TOMs have become the most pressing concerns for the industry as their high rates are making UK tourism most uncompetitive and travel more expensive.

While many European countries have actually reduced APD to encourage activity, the present Government increases it. The Government consistently fails to see the benefits to the UK economy of a buoyant overseas holiday industry and the lack of it in tourism strategy only reinforces this.

The British Hospitality ­Association report said cutting VAT on hotel rooms to 6.5%, as they have in Germany, would help create 236,000 jobs over the next five years and boost visitor numbers. Clearly, we are missing out on an opportunity to create 236,000 new jobs. Britain has just come bottom out of 133 countries for price competitiveness.

And the policy does not address the biggest problem affecting inbound tourism. If you are a company based here trying to sell the UK abroad, you suffer a huge competitive tax disadvantage.

Most visitors coming to this country from long-haul markets (such as North America or Asia) buy their holidays through tour operators. In this country, they are taxed under the Tour Operators' Margin Scheme (TOMS). TOMS is applied to the margin between the cost of the components and the price charged to the consumer.

This margin is not profit. It contains everything not directly supplied by another company. All in-house supplies and all staffing are taxed under TOMS, as are agents’ commissions, marketing, and sales costs. These expenses are the process of adding value. TOMS is thus a levy on the investment made in order to assemble, sell, and deliver visitors to the UK. For a long-haul operator, it is equivalent to a corporation tax of 800%.

If a company is based outside the EU, TOMS is not collectable and so not paid. Thus nearly all incoming operators that sell to consumers are now based off-shore.

Conversely, as this tax is on “services supplied in the EU,” all non-EU holidays sold in the UK (say, to Turkey or to Florida) are untaxed. Thus TOMS is a tax on exports and grants tax-free status to our tourism imports.

For a UK-based company, it is overwhelmingly more sensible to invest in selling non-European holidays than to try and sell a UK holiday to a visitor.

This problem is not actually to do with the level of VAT, but the way in which it is applied to exports. We desperately need to attract visitors to this country. But the process of doing so is subjected to a punitive level of taxation.

Really there should be no VAT on exports which are used abroad. Tourism is an export but the creation of holidays in the EU for visitors from outside the EU is subject to VAT under TOMS. That is different from every other type of export and it’s clearly disadvantageous to inbound tourism.

If the government is serious about encouraging more people to come here, then the Minister needs to go to Brussels and convince the other member states to reform TOMS because there is a massive disincentive on EU-based companies promoting EU-based holidays.

Government Tourism Policy 2011.pdf