Tourism minister’s blog looks at staycation figures

In his blog today on the Department for Culture, Media and Sport website, Tourism Minister John Penrose muses on the weather and some encouraging figures on tourism businesses in the UK.

Here’s what he had to say:

"It would be handy to be able to kick this little effort off with something about ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’ or a doleful suggestion that ‘summer’s lease hath all too short a date’ but, let’s be honest, there’s a better than even chance that you’ll be moaning about it all being too hot and muggy as you read this.

But that’s September in England for you – where Four Seasons is not only a type of pizza and an orchestral work by Vivaldi, but also a fairly reliable daily weather forecast for this time of year.

Be that as it may, the splendid folk at VisitEngland have declared summer to be officially over and marked the occasion with some research findings about how ‘accommodation providers’ (a clunky phrase, I agree, but you can see what they mean) fared across the period. And I’m very pleased to report that the answer is ‘very nicely, thank you’.

It seems that 87 per cent of what they call ‘operators’ (and, again, the word is not meant pejoratively) declared themselves to be satisfied with how business had been across the summer, with around three quarters saying that business had ‘either increased or stayed the same compared to the same period in 2009’. This is good stuff.

And if you’re thinking that ‘either increased or stayed the same… etc’ is rather less than a ringing endorsement, then you don’t know these ‘operators’. Trust me, they’re not a starry-eyed bunch, and are not at all backward in coming forward when it comes to letting people know when things aren’t right.

What makes all this especially heartening is that last year (that’s the year, compared with which, people’s satisfaction had ‘either increased or… etc’, don’t forget) was a bumper year for what became – and still is, I suppose – known as staycationing, because of the economy.

I appreciate that our marketing of this beautiful country was not exactly impeded by the best efforts of that Icelandic volcano or airline industrial relations, but even so, this is highly impressive. Lines on graphs that head north from left to right are to be welcomed, when the stuff being measured is success."

To read the full blog, go to http://blogs.culture.gov.uk/main/2010/09/summertime_and_the_living_eith.html