Is the government aiming to kill London’s hospitality sector with a double tourist tax?

There was a time – not so long ago, even though it sounds in sepia – when London was a place where tourists arrived without stars in their eyes and were left with shopping bags cutting circulation with their fingers.

Harrods bags, Selfridges bags, mulberry bags, yellow Fortnum looking clothes from hotel room furniture. Europe’s mature playground; ntattan’s Manhattan sibling; Tokyo’s concept of European Swagger with better taiting and chaotic restaurants.

And somehow, somewhere between the end of the pandemic and the beginning of whatever this new national grooming trend was, we decided that this was all just not good for me.

Because now, instead of rolling out the red carpet to the most used guests who are used to the great swearing of our hospitality industries and commercial areas, we seem determined to make them have a series of policy banana skins. A kind of bureaucratic mario kart, except instead of caltoon plusts skidding off rainbow road, it’s Andrea Baldo at Mulberry watching millions opened from London until.

First came the elimination of tax-free shopping, that bress calls “tourist tax”, but business leaders now refer to the same tone and the same influence of the wasp nyot. It was, in the kind words of one consumer employer, “the world’s biggest nuisance”. He is not good. France Woos Chinese tourists getting quick VAT refunds at Charles de Gaulle, Italy Tourists’ hands look on as they process theirs. At that time, we greet them with a traffic keeper’s budget in a bad situation.

Chiefs Retail has been patient – or at least, as patient as you can be where you come from, month after month, that the numbers just work. Guests want to enjoy the vat-free spoon. If we don’t deliver, they just go somewhere else. So the growing chorus from the likes of mulberry’s baldo, he watched the london tank while paris beutiques houtiques hots. It doesn’t take a PWC report to see what’s happening: Buyers follow value, and value has moved.

You might think the lesson here is obvious. If you want tourists, the money-spending kind who treat a long weekend like the Olympics, then don’t levy them on arrival. You would think, perhaps collectively, that the next step would be to undo the damage, or at least stop adding new obstacles.

But no. This is London. And in London, when there is an opportunity to make a very bad idea, we take it with both hands and press releases.

Step forward Sadiq Khan, announcing with great excitement the introduction of the second tourist tax – the night tax in the hotel stays, we are told, “London’s economy of London. What is the interesting definition of “Supercharge”, unless we start using the word to say “Ask people a lot of money to spend less of it elsewhere”.

This proposed hotel, which is being advertised as a parrot with money in line with other cities of the world, is the second punch in one attack against the total hospitality. Because let’s be clear: London is not barcelona, ​​it’s dead in Stag Dos Stripland in the springs. And it’s not Amsterdam, which declares war on the industrial party. London’s problem isn’t too many tourists – it’s that we’re making ourselves redundant from the ones we need.

Which is why the hospitality industry looks a little like a boxing ring in the 11th round, jumped a little, blood in the eye, another one erupted? “

Newly lit hotels outside the covial crater. It costs workers. Energy bills are high. Providing chart madness. After that the tourist economy is still recovering in these years when the only people entering important hotels were important employees and couples pretending to be “working at home”. Income is fragile. Margins are thin. And now it’s a charge made by the city hall?

Time is amazing. As business travelers, the Holy Grail of Midweek Optoncting, began to return … Just as American tourists rediscover the coadow of the short armed with Amex and enthusiasm … We decide to give a fee.

What message does it send? Similar to the VAT reverse Fiasco: London becomes the most expensive city in Europe to visit, and the least rewarding.

It’s basically a failure of imagination. Instead of asking “How do we compete?”

The answer, by and large, is not much.

Because visitors talk. They are compared. They counted. And when your long holiday costs thousands, and the pound is weak, and hotels are smarter than ever, that extra night is not ruined – it’s annoying. Add in the lack of VAT refunds and suddenly the weekend that once felt like therapy becomes an incarnation of financial masochism.

All of this can be stylish if the money raised is reserved for something brilliant – the renewal of transport, the renewal of culture, tolerance for travelers, the highest level of hospitality that visitors will pay. But the rhetoric is unclear, the benefits theoretical, and the impact on the ground immediately.

The truth is disgustingly simple: London thrives when it welcomes, no-nonsense, rewarding and – above all – competition. What we have instead is the curious realization that our leaders view visitors not as valuable visitors, but as they go, their wallets will take out more because, well, they can.

The hospitality and retail sectors do not require additional tax. They need policy makers who understand that the tourist economy is not a temple that can be opened and closed in white. It is fragile, active, easily diverted.

Right now, we are solving it.

London does not require a second tourist tax. It needs a second thought.