The UK travel industry continues to bleat hard about the damaging effects of the foot and mouth crisis. But the whole thing is masking uglier problems putting foreign visitors off the UK.
Namely xenophobia.
John Hooper, The Observer 's Berlin correspondent, described in this newspaper last wek how it is socially acceptable in Britain to criticise other Europeans using words such as 'Kraut', 'Frog' and 'dago' while it is not all right to use disparaging names for people from Pakistan, India or the Caribbean.
This was also highlighted by David Howard, a reader from Wimborne in Dorset, who wrote to me last week describing the prejudice some European visitors encounter when travelling in Britain.
'My wife and I enjoyed an excellent cycling tour of Denmark and northern Germany. In conversation with fellow ferry passengers and others we met, we were struck by the consistency of their stories about England, particularly how expensive everything is. Is it not sad that, at a time when these visitors read in our tabloid press about our supposed hatred of foreigners, they also feel they are being exploited when they come here?' he writes.
We have often written in Escape during the past few months about the impression given by rip-off Britain (Mr Howard adds to our catalogue of woes with his own experience of being charged £5.50 recently for a sandwich in Cornwall).
But last week's front page picture in the Mirror pretending to burn the gloves of the German goalkeeper with the headline: 'The body of Oliver Kahn's gloves will be cremated and the ashes taken to England,' could not have done more damage to our tourism industry. Not only would visitors have failed to miss this in pubs and trains, but it was widely reported in the German press. Would you want to travel around a country where people gloat and jeer at you and make constant references to your bad football?
When I first met my now husband, I started to experience the type of taunting that starts off appearing like harmless fun, but later makes you despise the deliverer of such jokes and feel depressed.
At the time I was editor of a travel newspaper and on hearing that I was dating a German, an advertising management colleague regularly goose-stepped past my desk, two fingers plastered across his upper lip before coming to a halt and shouting: 'Heil Hitler'. Germans are often accused of a sense of humour failure, but with jokes like that, it is not surprising that they aren't amused.
Last week's figures by the Office of National Statistics show overseas visitor arrival figures to the UK have slumped 5 per cent to 13 million people and spending has dropped 9 per cent to £6.5 billion for the period January to July 2001, compared with the same figure a year earlier.
It's only when people hit us in the pocket do we think about what we're doing wrong.
Let's hope our negative attitude to European visitors is taken into account and the blame is not centred entirely on foot and mouth.
