In message , at 12:06:40
on Tue, 21 Apr 2015, David Cantrell remarked:
On Mon, Apr 20, 2015 at 12:48:47PM +0100, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 12:13:32
on Mon, 20 Apr 2015, David Cantrell remarked:
Incidentally, are you *sure* that all the shops on Oxford Street depend
on tourists?
I didn't say "all" of them.

You said "pretty much every shop" which is as near as damnit "all".

Pretty much every shop is a fashion chain store. Have you been there
recently? Picking a few outliers won't change that.

loads of businesses that care not a jot about tourists.
So perhaps tourism isn't an important industry in London, after all, and
they aren't spending ?14 billion a year, and absolutely no jobs would be
at risk if they went to Paris instead.

It's not clear to me how that compares to the GVA of 309 billion (that
and "London's GDP is bigger than that of Belgium" is the only vaguely
relevant data I could quickly find),

A lot of London's value-add is in financial services, but £14bn is a lot
of money however you look at it.

but it certainly looks like tourism
isn't particularly important. Of course some jobs would be lost if the
number of tourists fell, but I doubt it would be a *lot* of jobs, unless
we were to make a really strenuous effort to abolish tourism entirely,
which clearly isn't happening and won't happen.

29 million visitors a year, 1200 hotels with nearly 120,000 rooms...

--
Roland Perry