UK NEWS

LOCK UP YOUR HOTELS, THE BRITS ARE COMING

The Brits in action

Wednesday May 23,2007

By Graham Hiscott, Consumer Journalist of the Year

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HANG out the flags, the British are no longer the world’s worst holidaymakers.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that foreign hoteliers still quake at our approach.

There is one consolation, though – our oldest enemy, the French, have taken over from us as the real holidaymakers from hell and we have “improved” to fifth-worst tourists out of 24 nations.

In a survey of more than 15,000 hoteliers around the world, the Japanese were named as the best guests overall – well-behaved, quiet and polite.

But the same cannot be said of the British abroad. Hotel owners reeled off a list of gripes about us.

We’re noisy and badly behaved, they complain – and our penchant for socks and slippers does us no stylistic favours, with hoteliers drawing attention to our abysmal holiday dress sense. The only tourists with worse sartorial tastes are Americans, according to the survey by travel website Expedia.co.uk.

Foreign hoteliers still perceive Britons as noisy, untidy and badly dressed.

Caroline Cartellieri, Expedia.co.uk

The best-dressed national visitors are Italians, French and Spanish.

But the French have replaced us as the worst holidaymakers on Earth due to their unwillingness to speak the local language, their meanness in tipping and their general rudeness.

Some of the harshest criticism about Britons came from UK hotel owners. They said home-grown guests had the worst manners.

But it was not all bad. Britons were praised as being among the world’s most generous guests when it comes to tips, beaten only by the Americans and Russians.

“We decided to compile another tourist league in order to reassess the reputation of British tourists – obviously with the hope that we would have risen up the ranks since 2002,” said Caroline Cartellieri, the managing director of Expedia.co.uk.

“However, it’s disappointing to learn that our position in the world rankings hasn’t really changed, and that foreign hoteliers still perceive Britons as noisy, untidy and badly dressed.”

There was a better response for the UK itself in a separate report yesterday. The new edition of the Lonely Planet guide to Britain generally gave “cosmopolitan” UK the thumbs-up as a tourist destination.