CRI听力:Britain Tries to Attract More Chinese Tourists

China is the currently the fastest growing source of tourism revenue for the entire world, but Britain is missing out due to its complex visa rules.

Chinese tourists are expected to spend the equivalent of more than one and a half billion U.S. dollars in Britain this year, much of it in London.

Gordon Innes is the Chief Executive Officer with London & Partners.

"We're seeing Chinese tourist numbers growing very rapidly every year to the UK. Last year almost 400,000 Chinese coming into the UK came through London."

That sounds like good news for London, except that about three times as many Chinese tourists visit the French capital Paris.

France and most other European countries are in the Schengen zone, which means if you get a visa for one country, you automatically have a visa for the rest.

But Britain remains outside the Schengen passport free zone and plans to stay there.

The British government thinks it may have found a solution.

"The exciting thing is we now can parallel process a Schengen visa and a U.K. visa at the same time."

Christopher Rodrigues is the chairman of VisitBritain.

According to the agency, the number of Chinese visitors to Britain in the first six months of 2015 reached a record 90,000, a 28 percent rise on the same period of 2014.

And tourism officials are expecting the total number of Chinese visitors for the year to reach more than 200,000.

Rodrigues says the current procedure for applying both a Schengen visa and a U.K. visa is still costly and time consuming, and to meet expectations, the British government needs to do something more.

"Our leading finance minister has initiated a scheme to bring 50,000 additional visitors from China not having to pay for a visa, so it's a free visa scheme."

Britain is also re-branding several famous tourist destinations in Mandarin, with Savile Row being translated in English as "Tall, Rich, Handsome Street" and London's tallest building the Shard becoming "Star Plucking Tower".

The initiatives appear to be working, because Chinese tourist numbers are growing in the U.K. though the industry believes the true potential remains untapped.

London is currently the world's most popular tourist destination, though Chinese visitors account for less than three percent of total tourism spending.

For CRI, I am Guo Yan.