HARD SELL FOR BEEFEATERS BRITAIN CAMPAIGNS TO WIN MORE U.S. TOURIST DOLLARS

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33804, 29 March 1975, Page 14

HARD SELL FOR BEEFEATERS BRITAIN CAMPAIGNS TO WIN MORE U.S. TOURIST DOLLARS

(By

EDWARD MACE,

for rhe Observer Foreign A eu-s Service)

To the world’s tourist authorities Americans are like the monsoons. If they are late, or worse, don’t come at all. the situation is bad the first year; if it happens two years running the result could be disaster.

There was a frightening fall off in the number of American visitors to Europe in 1974. Britain managed to hold on to its share —traditionally half the total number of Americans coming to Europe come to Britain ami this pattern was maintained—but the figures were still 20 per cent down on the previous year.

Everyone in the tourist business, from carriers, luxury hoteliers to West End theatre managers and Scottish lairds with saimon fishing rights to let, is earnestly hoping that the flow will resume in 1975.

Nobody is praying harder than the London taxidrivers, who were very hard hit by the non-arrival of American tourists in 1974. One thing is certain, the Americans who do come will be sure of a hearty welcome.

The British actually like Americans and resent the exaggerated reports of high prices of hotels and restaurants and services, the stories about visitors choking over a plate of prunes at caviar prices and the letters published in American papers complaining that the new Value Added Tax is exorbitant.

They blame conditions in the United States for keeping Americans at home, preferring to ignore how terrible Britain’s image looked to the world at the beginning of 1974, a collage of social and political unrest, bombs in the Tower of London and in the car park at Heathrow Airport, dark streets and shopping by candlelight. None of these things, it is true, seemed to keep others away. The number of Canadians visiting Birtain rose last year. So did the over-all figure and 1974 finished as a record. What is more, says the British Travel Authority, the Government-backed organisation ■whose job it is to get the tourists, the Americans themselves started coming again as soon as President Nixon had resigned and the worst of Watergate appeared to be over.

The Authority is, nevertheless, leaving nothing to luck. It is going ahead with plans to give Britain a really hard sell in North America, determined, in its own words "to at least maintain the 20 per cent decrease.” The Department of Trade and Industry has alloca'ed the largest budget yet for this year’s | “Come to Britain” campaign. • A high-powered team of salesmen, privately sponsored by a wide range of tourist interests and supported by the deeplv-anxious British Airways, National Airlines and Air France (which want people to visit Britain and France together), descended on America early this month, out to sell Britain hard from coast to coast. Britain will be advertised for the first time on American television, a change of media, but the selling points remain the same, the usual line in Beefeaters, thatched cottages and London buses. The trouble is that promoters seem hard pressed for new ideas. Regent Street in London is 150 years old this year and shops like Liberty’s are presenting special displays. Everbody is hoping that this will strike a nostalgic pang in the hearts of the travel-reluctant Americans. Stratford, scraping the barrel, too, is celebrating the centenary of the founding of the first'Shakespeare theatre in the town with an Elizabethan fair.

Great hopes had been pinned on the Prince of Wales getting married, or at least announcing his engagement. A Royal event gets the widest publicity of all. But there is no hard news from that quarter and it is now

I felt that Prince Charles may Shave left it too late to have imuch impact on 1975. I Tourists can rest happv ithat Britain's domestic and 'economic difficutlties wii! jnot spoil their holiday because they simply do not show' on the surface. You would have to live here to realise how' grave the situation is.

Cetainly, four West End theatres are dark through lack of backing for plays to put in them but the other 42 are doing moderately good business. Their managers, are however, scanning the horizon even more anxiously than usual for tourists.

Opening nights at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, still teem with the rich and beautiful. After the curtain you cannot move in Bow Street for the press of chauffeured Rolls-Royces. The fact that their owners may be making discreet inquiries at Sotheby’s, the saleroom experts, about how much their French Impressionist pictures would fetch at auction, need not worry a tourist.

The Savoy Grill, closed 5 last April "for redecoration,” lis opening again in July, i Rumours that there was no | longer the trade for such a | restaurant are obviously disproved. I Mr Beverly Griffin, the general manager of the Savoy, is cheerful enough. He says that advance bookings are well up on last year. They would need to be; 1974 was appalling for the capital’s grand hotels. Along the soft reaches of the Thames at Marlow, Mr Michael Pitt, director of the Compleat Angler, one of England’s most elegant hotels, says that American bookings are definitely better than in 1974. He stoutly repudiates, too, allegations that American visitors are no longer being treated with the deference they expect because the dollar to English eyes is not as almighty as it was. Other leading hotels say the same, not all quite so convincingly. At the New Berkeley, perhaps Britain’s finest hotel in the social sense, it does seem that the richest and grandest visitors are now French and Italian. What is not in dispute is that the days of the dollar buying cut-price holidays for Americans in Britain are over. The leading hotels and restaurants are far too tlyAmericans who used to be able to afford to stay in the best hotels in Britain, even though they could never have stayed in an equivalent hotel at home, can never hope to again. Americans will find the British sympathetic about this. They have been through a similar change in circumstances, heart. The landed aristocracy, horrified at new measures being introduced by the Labour Government to prevent them dodging death duties on their immense wealth, say that their unique way of life will soon cease. If so, those great old houses, still inhabited by., belted earls living a kind of life which has disappeared everywhere else, will soon be as empty as the chateaux on the Loire. Visitors interested in the aristocratic tradition had better come soon. O.F.N.S. Copyright.