Chinese in sights as tourism bid follows the Games

Chinese visitors and domestic tourists will be targeted under the strategy announced by Mr Hunt yesterday, with Ministers hopeful the number of holidaymakers from the Far Eastern country can be trebled.

He pledged the Government will encourage visitors to travel beyond London to areas such as Yorkshire and Scotland, revealing that 50 per cent of foreign tourists never set foot outside the capital.

And he promised to maintain the focus on domestic tourism by extending a recent advertising campaign starring Stephen Fry and Rupert Grint celebrating “holidaying at home”.

“The Olympics must be for Britain what Usain Bolt is for athletics – something that grabs the attention of the whole world and refuses to let it go,” Mr Hunt said.

“We must use this extraordinary year to turbo-charge our tourism industry, to create jobs and prosperity on the back of a globally-enhanced reputation.”

The strategy will involve an £8m extension of the “Great” marketing campaign, which Mr Hunt said had drawn plaudits from around the world.

Officials at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport believe a focus on China has the potential to triple the number of tourists entering UK from there.

The Government will also continue to encourage Britons to take a break in the UK, investing £2m in marketing domestic tourism – a sum that will be matched by the industry.

“No longer will domestic tourism be the poor relation when it comes to big marketing campaigns,” Mr Hunt said. “The domestic tourism advertising campaign we saw earlier this year will not be our last. We will invest a further £2m in a follow up campaign next year, to be increased further with match-funding, in order to build on the success of the ‘Holiday at Home’ campaign.”

Mr Hunt said there will also be a push by Visit England to make it easier to book domestic holiday packages over the internet,

“The Olympic Torch Relay has really helped to ignite domestic interest in UK holidays,” he said. “In fact, about one in 10 expect to visit a destination off the back of seeing the Olympic flame there.

“But it is still too difficult to book domestic holiday packages on the web. So Visit England has committed to double the number of domestic package breaks being booked in the years ahead by bringing together website retailers, car rental groups, train companies, airlines and hotel groups.”

Over the longer term, Mr Hunt said, infrastructure projects such as high-speed rail will further encourage both domestic and foreign tourists to visit other parts of the UK.

He also promised to capitalise on events such as the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

But he made clear there will be no new funding available to bodies such as Welcome to Yorkshire, who had their funding cut by the Coalition’s austerity package.

Speaking afterwards, Tourism Minister John Penrose defended the decision to remove funding from “destination management organisations” (DMOs), insisting it had forced such bodies to take on a new commercial focus.

“DMOs have had to reshape themselves, but in the process they have become much more commercially-led,” he said. “Someone like Welcome to Yorkshire is starting from a very good position there.

“They were already that way inclined – but many others weren’t,” he added.

“Getting those sorts of organisations to become commercially-led and sharp edged is a major, major contribution.”

But civic leaders in Yorkshire said the lack of funding for the region’s tourism bodies raised question marks about the Government’s entire strategy.

Councillor Keith Wakefield, leader of Leeds City Council, said: “For Jeremy Hunt’s warm words about Yorkshire tourism to have credibility, money should be passed immediately without Whitehall strings attached to Welcome to Yorkshire and local bodies like Marketing Leeds, to help support local businesses now.”