London lacks lucre for tourism

The London Tourist Board is launching a “major” ad campaign in Europe and the US, and the total spend is a whopping 1.3m. It will be handled by two French agencies, Publicis and Pavloff & Associates (imagine any similar French, or for that matter Scottish operation, being so free from xenophobia that it would use a foreign agency; well done LTB).

Now, to the impoverished urbanite who is the Diary, 1.3m is a lot of money, but in the great scheme of marketing it’s a pittance – less than four per cent of the spend of one of the LTB’s foremost partners, British Airways, for instance.

The LTB says foreign visitors to the capital spend 7bn a year, providing London with eight per cent of its gross domestic product. Despite these figures it’s actually falling behind in the world city tourism league. So, to shame all those companies which benefit from foreign lucre without giving anything in return, the Diary says to the LTB: “Here’s a pound. Don’t spend it all at once.”