Brexit and Tourism


After Brexit, the EU referendum when Britain decided to leave the European Union, the British currency, the sterling, became weaker against the euro and the dollar. This however resulted in attracting more tourists to Britain, especially from North America, who wanted to take advantage of the favourable exchange rate, with the pound dropping in value against the dollar. This drop meant that Americans visiting Britain paid much less for hotels and therefore had more holiday money to spend. The number of visitors from EU countries also increased by 8% in 2016 compared to the previous year.

The British tourism minister however stressed that this increase in visitors was not only due to the weaker pound, but was also proof that Britain has everything the tourist wants, from vibrant cities to stunning landscapes and many cultural attractions. Yorkshire seems to be one of the areas that benefited most with a record 476,000 visitors in the three months following the referendum, amounting to a 12% increase compared to the same period the year before.

The national tourism agency, VisitBritain, has confirmed that so far, 2017 has been another successful year for the tourism industry and has registered an increase of 16% of flight bookings to the UK between February and April compared to the year before.

This tourist boost is, they say, due primarily to the weak pound. At the end of January 2017, for example, it was 10% cheaper for Chinese tourists to visit the UK than the previous year.

However, while the number of visitors to the UK has risen, economists say that this increase in tourism will not completely solve the general trend of a slowdown on domestic spending. Reports after the referendum suggested that retail sales went up as overseas visitors took advantage of the weak pound to purchase luxury goods like watches and jewellery. However, British shoppers are reducing their spending as they try to cope with higher fuel prices and food bills that are eating into their household finances.


Answer the following questions

1 Why did more Americans want to visit Britain after Brexit?
2 What other reasons did the British tourism minister give for the increase in visitors?
3 What data does the national tourism agency, VisitBritain, have to confirm this increase in tourists?
4 Why aren’t British people spending as much as they did before?

(Source: Explore © ELI)


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back to School

Image
 Dear Students,  Happy to meet you again after all this extremely challenging time!  I hope you are well and that Covid-19 hasn’t been too difficult to face for you and your families.  I’d like to greet your back to school days with this wonderful poem by Black American poet Amanda Gorman,  The Miracle of Morning (April 2020), a hymn to solidarity, empathy and optimism even in the tragic times we have experienced.  Let’s read it scrolling down this page or listen to it together clicking on  this link  and discuss it.  Enjoy the poem and the new school year! I thought I’d awaken to a world in mourning. Heavy clouds crowding, a society storming. But there’s something different on this golden morning. Something magical in the sunlight, wide and warming. I see a dad with a stroller taking a jog. Across the street, a bright-eyed girl chases her dog. A grandma on a porch fingers her rosaries. She grins as her young neighbor brings her groceries. While we might feel small, separate, and all a
Read more

Banksy and Street Art

Image
After the long summer break, let’s start the new school year finding inspiration in a very special kind of art: street art. Read about Banksy, one of the most celebrated street artists in the world, at  this link  and then scroll down his official  Instagram account .
Read more

A Day for Critical Foodies

Image
There was an interesting conference on food design yesterday in the school where I currently teach.  The pretext was the presentation of a book titled ‘La cucina di design. Cibo, tendenze, moda’ by a dear colleague and friend of mine, Loredana La Fortuna. The topic was food design, an issue analyzed from the critical lenses of social semiotics, definitely an unusal perspective for the students of a ‘Professionale Alberghiero’.  Food is not just what we eat. It is a language and, as such, it can express several meanings concerning family and national traditions, lifestyle, environment, hierarchies, gender roles, religion, cultural politics and ... Art, as Loredana’s book highlights.  Therefore, studying food means studying culture. I really recommend the reading of this book edited by Progedit (Bari 2016) to all the students and people interested in deconstructing the contemporary trend of ‘foodism’. Thanks a lot to all the participants to yesterday’s school event. 
Read more