VisitBritain chief says visitors deterred by prices and service

High prices and poor service are keeping foreign visitors away from Britain when the country’s economy needs them the most, the chief of the national tourism authority is warning.

Christopher Rodrigues, the chairman of VisitBritain, is predicting that the situation could cost a loss of revenue in 2009 of as much as £4 billion and up to 50,000 jobs.

The tourism executive noted that visitors frequently face rude or unhelpful staff and conditions where clean towels or a fresh bar of soap haven’t been provided.

“We’ve had a period in which people could get away with not being of the highest quality. We’re now in an environment where you have to do quality. Poor value for money and poor service costs jobs and will cost more jobs in a recession,” Rodrigues said to The Independent.

He added: “Threadbare towels, a previously owned bar of soap and a grumpy person who says: ‘We don’t do breakfast before 8am and we don’t do it after 8.12am’ – you don’t get a lot of happy customers. Some people are born to be in service industries and some people are born to be service industry customers.”

Thanks to www.telegraph.co.uk for the above quotes, for more information on this article please visit their website.

www.visitbritain.com