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| | | | 17/08/2015 | Telegraph, Lauren Davidson - Spending spree by Chinese fails to lift UK high street gloom | | | | | Chinese tourist spend in the UK up 45% in July | | | | | The Telegraph reports that spending by Chinese tourists in the UK increased by 45% in July compared to the same period last year after visa rules were relaxed at the start of the month, although this surge was not enough to revive visitor numbers on the British high street.
People from China spent £50m on Visa cards in the UK during July, overtaking French and Australian visitors to become the second highest spending tourists to the UK, according to figures from the credit card giant.
Only Americans spend more while travelling in the UK than the Chinese, splashing £140m on Visa cards last month, up 16% on the year earlier.
Rising disposable incomes among China’s growing middle class have boosted the number of Chinese people travelling internationally, with China becoming the largest supplier of outbound tourists in the world in 2013, the most recent year with available data from the World Bank.
Around 98m people from mainland China - not including the 84.4m tourists from Hong Kong - ventured abroad in 2013, more than twice the number who travelled internationally five years earlier, World Bank figures show.
Official Chinese data show that 107m Chinese people travelled abroad last year, 19% more than the year before, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch expects that to reach 174m by 2019.
Chinese tourists also pump the most money into the global economy, surpassing the US in 2013 to spend a total of $138.3bn while travelling.
In a bid to increase the appeal of these shores to the increasingly important deluge of Chinese travellers, the UK has been relaxing its visa regulations for visitors from the world’s second largest economy.
As of July 1, Chinese people can now apply for visas for the UK and Europe in the same process, streamlining the previous system that required travellers from China to fill out separate applications for visiting the UK and the Schengen area of 26 European countries.
In 2013, fewer than 300,000 UK visas were approved compared to 1.4m Schengen visas.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that the number of visitors from China dropped by almost 7.6% last year to 185,000, while overall tourists to the UK increased by 5.2%.
The 45% increase in Chinese spending last month follows a 79% growth between 2013 and 2014 and a 27pc rise the previous year, according to Visa data. |
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