The Mayor is right — the capital is having a successful summer, despite the majority of schools having only just broken up.
Here in the West End, summer began early with the coronation attracting international and domestic visitors to once-in-a-lifetime experiences that only this iconic British district could deliver.
Throughout the months to follow, the indicators of footfall and spend have continued to tell a positive story. Footfall is growing year on year and spend is growing, both compared to last year and to 2019.
Domestic spend is certainly proving more conservative due to the cost of living crisis, and therefore our recovery is largely being driven by international visitors. It is clear to me that they are key to future growth and remaining on track to deliver our historic £10billion district turnover by the end of 2025.
And so we should be doing everything we can to entice them to our shores, to come more often and stay longer.
VisitBritain tells us half of all long-haul travellers come to the UK to shop, so ensuring we remain an attractive shopping destination globally is paramount.
As word gets out that we no longer offer tax-free shopping our ability to compete with the likes of Paris or Milan is becoming more challenging. Our retailers tell us tourists browse here but divert spend to their European counterparts.
Take Americans for example... thanks to a favourable exchange rate, US spend in the West End at the beginning of 2023 was 104 per cent of 2019 levels. But in France tax-free refunds for US shoppers were up by 313 per cent, and 312 per cent in Spain.
In 2019, 57 per cent of all West End spend was from international visitors, while in 2023 this stands at 44 per cent. There is an ever-growing gap between the recovery in travel and spend. By this time next year genuine behaviour change could become irreversible, new shopping patterns will soon become a habit and then loyalty shifts forever.
If we can shrug off the restraints of the “tourist tax” we will encourage a stronger recovery and remain a competitive destination on the global stage.
So yes, in isolation we can be pleased with our performance but if you compare our summer end of term report with our European classmates, we know that the headmaster would comment at the end “could do so much better”.
