1 0 How to advertise foreign travel am supposed to be the Grand Panjandrum of travel advertising, I because of my campaigns for Come to Britain, Come to France, Come to the United States, and Come to Puerto Rico. I have also done advertising for various carriers, including Cunard, P&O and KLM. And for American Express, who provide the financial oil that keeps international travel going. When you undertake to advertise a foreign country, you have to be prepared for a lot of political flak. Research told me that what American tourists most wanted to see in Britain was history and tradition – Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London, Changing the Guard at Buckingham Palace, Oxford, that kind of thing. So that is what I featured in the advertisements, only to be slaughtered in the British press for projecting an image of a country living in the past. Why did I not project a progressive industrial society? Why did I not feature the nuclear power stations which the British had just invented? Because our research had shown that American tourists had no desire to see such things, that’s why. When our campaign started, Britain was the fifth most visited European country among American tourists. Today it is first. Not long ago, a Labour Government decreed that the ‘Come to Britain’ advertisements should feature only those areas of Britain which were economically depressed, the idea being that foreign tourists would cure unemployment. I had to point out that Birmingham, Liverpool and Wigan could not compete with Venice, Paris and Amsterdam. When we started advertising the United States in Europe, we used research to find out what the Europeans would most like to see. The answer was Manhattan, Grand Canyon, San Francisco, Niagara Falls and cowboys. So these were the attractions we featured in the advertisements – until the US Travel Service instructed us to feature