UK - Closed for Business?

With the Olympics in London, there has been much debate in Travel and Tourism circles about the tourism benefits of  hosting the Olympic games this year.  London can rightly be proudly of the fact that the Olympics will attract more visitors than any other previous Olympic host city. That's 60,000 international visitors coming purely to see the Olympic games (and twice as many that visited Athens for example)


Critics however argue that this increase in visitors to the Olympics is massively offset by the huge fall in international leisure visitors - or in other words, the huge number of visitors who will actively seek to travel elsewhere in order to avoid visiting London when the Olympics are on!


(For more on this see BlogPost - The Ups and Downs of London Tourism )


However, there is also one other major reason why tourists are choosing to travel elsewhere other than the UK - and it has nothing to do with the Olympics.  It's the difficult and obstructive process of obtaining a visa!  A process so difficult and absurd in its application that many people simply give up!


The European Tour Operators Association (ETOA) have been campaigning and lobbying for a revision of the visa application process for many years seeing a simplification of the visa application process as conducive to boosting to incoming tourist business, and (multiplier) spend.


Last week there was a Radio 4 'Face the Facts' programme dedicated to this very subject  - have a listen to the arguments.  Some will say relaxing visa controls will lead to increases in illegal immigration and terrorism -  other, more rational people will argue that a sensible visa application system will boost visitors to the UK and  generate millions of extra consumption into the UK economy.


(Tom Jenkins of the ETOA and visa-reform-evangelist features in the programme)