Webinar | Tuesday 7th June 2022 | 08:45 to 10:00am BST
How can the government support the UK luxury sector’s efforts to promote Great Britain to high-value international visitors?
As international travel returns post pandemic, high value international visitors are driving a very rapid rebound for the luxury sector across Europe. However, as Bain’s data showed us at Walpole’s British Luxury Summit the week before last, the UK is lagging badly behind.
This doesn’t need to be the case – in fact, the UK’s high-end cultural and creative industries should and could be spearheading a fantastic recovery for the whole country, and getting back to the £30bn high-end visitors spent here in 2019, if only we had a level playing field with continental Europe when it comes to attracting the kinds of visitors who contribute the most to the country’s economy.
What do we want the government to do so that we can unlock the value in the UK’s incredibly alluring high-end brands, boost the exchequer at a time it needs it more than ever and create more highly skilled jobs for UK residents the length and breadth of the British Isles? Just three things: firstly, to reform the Visitor Visa particularly for those from the GCC where our current system creates high barriers to entry compared to Schengen countries; secondly, to bring back Tax Free shopping, the reintroduction of which could boost annual visitors by 600k and result in £1.2bn direct retail sales; and thirdly, to extend Sunday trading hours in the busy international shopping areas of the West End and Knightsbridge.
On Tuesday 7th June 2022, Walpole, the French Chamber, NWEC and AIR will be discussing the reasons why these three things are important, and the value they can unlock for the country, if we all work together. Register to join here.
Research (download the Walpole Tourism Report 2022 here) commissioned by Walpole and published at our British Luxury Summit, identified clear reasons why, if we want tourism to help kick start the economy and also be mindful about tourism’s impact on the environment, we should focus on the small proportion of visitors who make the biggest economic contribution when they come on holiday: this benefits not only retail and hospitality, but our incredible cultural institutions too, and has a highly beneficial spillover effect into other businesses too.
Across the whole of Europe, high-end tourists spend 8 times more than the average traveller. However, in the UK the high-end visitor is worth 14 times more in terms of daily spend than the mass tourists increasing to 20 times more on accommodation and 18 times more on culture, entertainment, shopping and dining.
The positive economic spillover from this revenue is also high - for every £1 spent by a high-end visitor, £8 of value is generated in other industries spread across the UK.
Crucially, as Walpole Chairman Michael Ward says, “this isn’t about getting posh people to London, but about generating jobs for large numbers of UK residents”. This is the British luxury superpower and it’s the reason we are asking the government for help.
But to unlock this exceptional value, we need to remove the barriers that have sprung up over the last few years and to do that we need to double down on our lobbying efforts with government, and use the full power of the combined forces of Walpole, the French Chamber and NWEC.
Join us on the 7th June to find out what we’re proposing, and how you can play your part.
Speakers:
Jace Tyrrell, Chairman, AIR
Helen Brocklebank, Chief Executive, Walpole
Sylvie Freund Pickavance, Group Director of Strategy and Business Development, Value Retail
Paul Barnes, Chief Executive, AIR
Alex Jan, Director Tax-Free Shopping Data Project
