Examination of Witnesses (Questions 88-99)
MR TOM
WRIGHT, MR
BERNARD DONOGHUE
AND MR
JAMES BIDWELL
18 OCTOBER 2005
Chairman: Can I first apologise for having
kept you waiting for so long but we did feel very strongly that
the tourism aspect of the 2012 Games was something that might
be overlooked and we are very keen that it should not be overlooked,
therefore we did think it important that you came to talk to us
at our first hearing and we hope that we can continue to maintain
that dialogue. First of all, welcome, Tom Wright and Bernard Donoghue
from VisitBritain and James Bidwell from Visit London. Can I ask
Janet Anderson to begin.
Q88 Janet Anderson: Thank you, Chairman.
VisitBritain reckons that staging the Games in London could add
something like £2 billion to the tourist economy, which is
obviously very much to be welcomed. Do you think that you should
have a position on the Organising Committee board? If not, are
there any other structures you would like to put in place to ensure
that the tourism aspects of this are properly managed?
Mr Wright: I think it is important
to recognise that LOCOG and the ODA are predominantly focused
on delivering the Games and the LOCOG structure is set up as part
of the bid and their relationship with the IOC, so we would not
necessarily expect to have a seat at that level. We are very much
committed to working in the Nations and Regions Group and working
with DCMS on the legacy aspects of the Games per se. One
of the key points we want to get over this afternoon is that our
main role is to look at the longer term benefits to the visitor
economy, and to that end VisitBritain and Visit London are working
together looking to set up a Tourism Business and Communications
Unit to focus on this longer term objective of delivering what
is predicted to be the single biggest benefit from the Games itself.
Well over 50% of the benefits will come through the visitor economy.
We are working on setting that up. We are developing a tourism
strategy which understands that the visitor economy cannot use
the branding around the Olympics. As Lord Coe explained, that
is very much specific to the sponsors. We had to find a parallel
position to market Britain globally around the Games itself. Australia,
for example, had "Australia 2000—Fun and Games'. That
was the way that their visitor economy was able to position themselves
alongside that. Secondly, we are also working on a charter for
the businesses themselves who are related to the visitor economy
so that we can promote Britain with a good value equation and
give consistency of approach to that. We have been heavily developing
our BritainNet project, which is an online representation of all
the attractions, all the venues, all the different things, all
the quality accredited accommodation, so there is a one-stop shop
for visitors all over the world to engage and visit Britain around,
before and after the Olympics itself.
Q89 Janet Anderson: Do you know what
has happened in other countries where the Olympics have been staged?
What influence have the tourist bodies had there?
Mr Wright: We have very much looked
at what has happened in Australia and Atlanta. There is a partnership
between the national and regional tourism agencies and they come
together typically to front the visitor economy elements of it.
A good example of where we have to work together is on the media
centres for the overseas journalists. There are obviously two
types of journalists who will come to this country around the
Games. There are the accredited journalists, who are really interested
in the sports aspects, but also tens of thousands of unaccredited
journalists who are really coming to cover Britain per se.
Our challenge during the Games itself is to make it a 17 day—to
use the words Australia did—documentary of all of Britain.
We have to set up this media centre for the unaccredited journalists
and manage that and, during the 36 billion viewer hours that are
consumed around the Games, make sure that Britain is projected
as this fantastic destination for people to come and visit, not
just London.
Q90 Janet Anderson: James, could
you just comment from a London point of view. Do you feel that
you are able to have sufficient influence over the tourism aspects
in terms of London?
Mr Bidwell: It is very important
that London does have a significant influence over how this all
plays out. As Visit London, we have worked very closely with the
bid team since the inception of the bid and worked alongside them.
We ran and organised the Olympic torch run and the concert in
The Mall. The opportunity for us is to continue to work with the
bid team. Hearing earlier about some of the issues around branding,
our objective will be to translate the magic of the Olympic experience
into something that we can tangibly use to drive economic benefit
for the tourism industry, not only in London but also into the
rest of the UK.
Q91 Janet Anderson: Do you think
there is sufficient reasonably priced accommodation in London
for all these new visitors who are going to come?
Mr Bidwell: Absolutely. The great
thing about London and the tourist industry in London is that
there is great breadth of accommodation. You could stay somewhere
for £50 in London but you could also stay for £2,000
or £3,000, so there is that breadth that we have. What we
have also done is worked with some of the major hotel groups in
order to guarantee allocations of rooms for that 2012 period.
At the moment there are letters of guarantee for 40,000 hotel
rooms in London which will be allocated at reasonable prices,
at competitive prices. The other thing that I think is very relevant
is that the bid team negotiated those rates via Visit London in
advance of the presentations in Singapore so that we knew before
we won that we would have those as part of our negotiation, if
you like, so there was not that mad rush straight after the winning
city was announced.
Mr Wright: There are currently
120,000 rooms within a 50km radius of the Games itself and that
will grow to 135,000, which is quite a large stock. One interesting
fact from the Sydney Olympics was nearly half the visitors were
often staying with friends, relatives and family, so there was
a big influx. We will see that in London as well. There are so
many connections in London. We will see this ability to soak up
not just in the hotel rooms but with all the friends and relatives
and connections Britain has globally. I think we are pretty well
equipped, frankly, to meet any big increase in visitors around
the Games itself.
Q92 Janet Anderson: Could you just
tell us a bit about how you compiled your data on the likely tourism
benefits in terms of the additional visitors? Are you looking
to Government for additional funding in order to market the Games
abroad and at home?
Mr Wright: At this stage we have
looked at Australia and Atlanta as examples of what we might achieve.
Australia had 1.6 million extra visitors between 1997 and 2004
who spent about $3.5 billion. Atlanta claimed they had $2.5 billion
of extra revenue from visitors. We have set £2 billion as
the bottom threshold of what we can achieve. I believe we can
greatly exceed that. One of the reasons we are so enthused and
have been a supporter, as have Visit London, from day one of this
is that currently 85% of the visitors to Britain—we have
28 million visitors from around the world—come from mainland
Europe, the Americas, Australia and Japan, a quite developed market,
but in the last few years the real big growth has been in India,
China, Malaysia, Thailand and Russia, and we have opened up offices
there in the last few years. We see by 2012, if you look at India
and China alone with a 2.5 billion population, this opportunity
will be enormous and we hope to greatly exceed the two billion.
In terms of funding, clearly Visit London and VisitBritain are
using their current resourcing to start to set up a joint unit
to develop the strategies and the charters and, going longer term,
setting up the visitor centres, the press centres, all of those
elements. Tourism Australia did receive some extra funding to
help set up its Olympic facilities and capabilities, and we will
talk to DCMS and work with the LDA and GLA collectively in ensuring
we are properly equipped to maximise what is this one-off fantastic
opportunity.
Q93 Janet Anderson: So you would
like some extra money?
Mr Wright: We would have to discuss
that with our stakeholders.
Mr Bidwell: The important thing
is to sustain the funding because the Olympic opportunity starts
now and we are going to be the host city for 2012, so we need
to be levering that opportunity from now. The important thing
is to sustain funding up to and after 2012 because there is great
evidence that says after the Games is when the city or the country
is at the top of the mind and there is a lot of benefit thereafter.
As an example, before the 1992 Olympics Barcelona was ranked as
the sixteenth most popular city tourist destination in Europe
but by 1999 it had risen to number three. I think that is a good
example of the very transformational effect that the Olympic Games
had on the city. The Australia brand advanced 10 years as a result
of the Olympic Games. London is a different city, it is a different
place, but we have an amazing momentum which we could really capitalise
on with the Olympics and the Paralympics.
Q94 Rosemary McKenna: Can I take
you outside London. You have a variety of markets to look at and
the way different people use their leisure time and holidays.
For example, take an American tourist who typically has only two
weeks' holidays, who comes to London and we want them to visit
the other parts of the UK, what are you doing to make sure that
information is going out there and the rest of the UK is going
to benefit as much as London?
Mr Wright: There are a number
of things that we are doing. First of all, our BritainNet project
brings together all the different destination sites across Britain
into a single website which we can translate, and do translate,
into over 40 languages around the world, so you will find it in
simplified and modern Chinese, you will find it in Korean, all
the different languages around the world. We can use London as
a gateway and market Britain globally in those different languages
and connect them up to the wonderful variety of venues, accommodation
and destinations that we have to offer. The second key thing is
the journalists themselves who will be coming pre, during and
post the Games. When I talk about this documentary of all of Britain,
we will be handling thousands of journalists coming for the Games.
If we looked at what happened in Australia, there were an enormous
number of journalists who were coming and Australia was quite
good at getting its journalists out across the whole of the country,
so we would like to get the journalists up to Scotland, to Wales
and other parts of the country. Thirdly, Lord Coe touched on some
of these training camps. The Gold Coast in Queensland is a very
good example. Because Team GB were based in Queensland, all the
British press went out with Team GB and there was massive coverage
of Queensland. If you talk to Australia now there is a British
market that did not exist going to the Gold Coast now on the back
of that market. Again, marketing where we get the different training
teams, training camps, all across Britain and cross-marketing
those will be an opportunity for us.
Mr Donoghue: We already bring
in 1,000 overseas journalists every year who go round all of the
United Kingdom and give us overseas global coverage. One of the
challenges to us, which is a good challenge, is that we are going
to be working with all the English RDAs, the Welsh Assembly Government
and the Scottish Executive through the Nations and Regions Group
that Lord Coe touched on earlier to make sure all of the UK economy
benefits from this. As a DCMS agency we have particular funding
targets that are set by DCMS for us and they include getting visitors
outside of London to benefit the whole of the UK economy. That
is certainly something that we will be pursuing right the way
through the Games and beyond.
Q95 Rosemary McKenna: Are you talking
to tourist organisations and companies, for example, to put together
packages which will include travel on to other parts of the UK
once they have been in London and watched the event that they
want to see? Will that all be part of the marketing?
Mr Donoghue: Yes, it will be.
Within literally 30 seconds of the announcement being made on
6 July our call centres started getting phone calls from around
the world saying, "We would like to book our hotel package
now". It was quite incredible. One of the things that we
are going to be doing, and we have been working on already with
the British Hospitality Association amongst others, is putting
together an Olympic Charter whereby people can subscribe to the
kind of welcome, the kind of hospitality and outreach work that
we want to put in place both now and also in London 2012 during
the Olympic year. That will be looking at packages both about
looking at attending the Games but also getting out around the
rest as well using all of the cultural assets that we have in
the UK. Those packages are being put together at the moment by
individual private sector companies but over the course of the
next couple of years we will be shaping what they look like.
Q96 Rosemary McKenna: I think that
is really important because there is so much that you do not want
to miss to make it available to people, to let them make their
choice and to make sure that it is there in front of them on offer
so that they can do it in the easiest way possible. Transport
now is very, very accessible across the UK and it would be a great
shame if more remote parts of the country, not just the north
of Scotland but the South West, for example, down to Devon and
Cornwall, were not in the package.
Mr Bidwell: Particularly as 50%
of the people who go to Scotland come through London, so there
are already those strong links. India has a good affinity with
Scotland because a lot of the Bollywood movies are shot up in
Scotland and, therefore, we are able to tailor packages and drive
people through London off to Scotland and other parts of the country.
That is something that Visit London is working very closely on
with the VisitBritain offices on an ongoing basis and we will
continue to do so.
Q97 Alan Keen: I was interested in
you grouping India and China as potential visitors. Recently,
with a lot of my backbench colleagues, I have spent an awful lot
of time with the Home Office Minister trying to find how we can
get relatives of my constituents into the country from India.
I saw on breakfast TV programmes about a month ago the Chinese
saying that they were surprised how much more expensive it was
to get a visa to the UK as against France and other countries
in Europe. What are you trying to do on this?
Mr Wright: The first thing to
say, to take India as an example, is we have just opened offices
in Mumbai and we are hoping to open offices in Bangalore later
this year which is probably our fastest growing, perhaps most
important, market for us over the next few years. In spite of
the slightly increased visa costs at the beginning of July, visa
applications in India are growing very strongly and we estimate
that there will be nearly 500,000 visa applications that will
come through from that Indian market. The other change in India
was over a year ago we only had about 18 direct weekly flights
between India and Britain and that is shooting up to over 100
under the new Open Skies Agreement. Likewise, in China we signed
Approved Destination Status at the end of January and we brought
our first groups from China under the new tourism visas. Clearly
these markets will take some years to develop but what the British
Government has done on the visas is outsource the offices to a
private contractor that gives much better coverage across China
and India. Before, effectively you had to go to three cities in
India to get your visas but now 12 cities have their own visa
offices. We are still offering 24 hour turnaround on those visas
and we are pretty well respected compared to other countries in
terms of the visa that we offer and as we move forward to biometrics,
which is part of the increase in cost of visas, we will give an
even better service to people coming to this country, so there
is some transition going on. I would say that the demand of interest
to come to Britain, particularly from India, is still very strong.
Q98 Alan Keen: Should I redirect
my constituents to send their relatives to your offices rather
than the High Commission? It is an enormous problem. It seems
a complete contradiction. I want to get as many people in from
India for the Olympics because we have such a large community
from India, and Pakistan as well. Have you talked to the Home
Office? How do you get people in? On what grounds do you give
them visas if they cannot get them for genuine family visits?
Mr Wright: Clearly visas is not
our remit. I cannot really talk for UK Visas in that respect.
All I can say is that the number of visas being issued in India
is going up significantly and we are seeing a big increase in
overall visitors from India, and that is both because there are
so many strong business connections now between India and Britain—Britain
is the third biggest investor in India and India is the sixth
biggest investor in Britain—and we are seeing a lot more
people visiting the over one million people with Indian backgrounds
living here, and we are also seeing a big increase in people coming
for holidays. UK Visas clearly have to manage that process. At
the moment we are seeing big increases in visitors from those
countries.
Q99 Mr Evans: Following on from what
Janet said earlier, the day after we had the terrorist attack
there were stories in newspapers the following day that hotels
had jacked up all of their prices to cash in on the fact that
people could not get home. Are you saying that the charter that
you have now got with the hotels will prevent that from happening,
that they are not going to put up their prices?
Mr Wright: We would like to work
with the industry to offer a charter to visitors that gives them
some reassurance about the pricing around that. I cannot give
you specifics of that because we are just having those discussions
and it is still some way off. As James said, it is worth recognising
that we have got guaranteed rates for 25,000 hotel rooms already
as part of the Olympic bid per se. I believe that the hotel
industry will want to be responsible. One of the lessons from
some of the other Olympics is do not over-hype it. There is a
great danger that you can over-hype it and put off visitors by
over-hyping the Games. We want to work with the industry in a
long-term managed positioning for visitors to this country. There
is a difference with London. We have 28 million visitors to this
country, half are coming to London and London is just about the
single strongest destination in the world, so it is well used
to coping with massive numbers of visitors per se and,
therefore, I do not think it will be as big an issue as perhaps
in other Olympic Games in terms of that over-hyping and ramping
of prices around that. We will work very closely with the hospitality
industry to manage that.
Mr Bidwell: Visit London has a
number of partners from the hotel industry. We have several hundred
partners as part of Visit London who also help fund us and we
have an ongoing relationship with those people. We worked with
them on behalf of the bid team to negotiate the rooms for the
Olympic moment, if you like. We can impact and influence them
through providing them access to the marketing campaigns and some
of the other activities. From the main breadth of the industry
we will have influence. There are always one or two who will take
advantage but we are as good as any in terms of setting it up
and the fact we are thinking about it now and putting those plans
into place should help.
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