Skift Take
Tourism, along with business travel, is on the rise again in the UK due to a weak British pound and cheap flights. VisitBritain is trying to make the most of it despite the lingering ramifications of the political mess that is Brexit.
It's been a rough 18 months for the UK government and economy following the Brexit vote in June 2016. Travel, however, has been a bright spot for the country despite the uncertain political climate.
August represented the strongest month ever for visitor spending across the UK, and the surge in travel shows no signs of slowing. The drop in currency value after Brexit has made the UK an affordable destination once again. There have been headwinds, however, namely an uptick in terrorism across the country in 2017.
Steve Ridgway, chairman of VisitBritain, thinks his organization needs to do more to ensure that travel is perceived as a power player among UK industries. He's worked to push travel and tourism into the political spotlight with a white paper detailing the creation of new "tourism zones" to capture increased demand.
Skift spoke to Ridgway about navigating the uncertainty of the Brexit negotiations and marketing the variety of travel offerings across the UK.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Skift: What are your thoughts on how the Brexit negotiations have affected visitation to the UK in the last year? It seems like a surprising bit of good news for the industry.
Steve Ridgway: The main thing everyone thinks about in the UK at the moment is Brexit, and Britain in the European Union. Obviously that is a massive topic, and it's massively complex and massively critical but life goes on in the meanwhile. There is huge inertia in the economy and one of the big success stories [is travel and tourism]. It's driven by the fact that we have a more competitive exchange rate since the referendum, and it's also driven by a lot of focus by the airlines on the amount and quality of air services going into the UK.
We are seeing really strong tourism numbers out of the U.S., both in volume and in value. The U.S. market was the largest tourism market into the UK and Europe for many years for lots of historical reasons. But nonetheless, those numbers fell off pretty dramatica
