Would you visit the US if there was a big-budget advertising campaign convincing the public how good our country is compared to Europe?
I’m based in St. Louis, Missouri and we in our home state need the British tourists to visit.
But what would it take to convince you Brits to stop visiting Majorca, Marbella, Costa del Sol, Portugal and visit some of our great cities instead – Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, New York City, Boston, Long Beach or our islands like American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands?
You Brits have more in common with us than Europeans. You always have. You’re not really that European anyway.
Believe me, British people ain’t European culturally, they’ve got more in common with Americans than Europeans.
Selena Gomez said it herself in a 2018 interview.
Would a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign on TV work for you?
Maybe even special deals from tour operators?
How would you feel about this?
36 comments
Cost, a flight to Spain is about £60, a flight to east coast alone is more like £400.minimum. when you multiply by a family of 4. it just makes more sense to stay local
The ability to get there cheaply. Typically, a return ticket to the States costs £400+. For the average family of 4, the cost is prohibitive.
Compare that to Spain or Portugal, and you can get return tickets for the whole family for the cost of one ticket to the US.
For the Pacific Islands we’d need to remortgage.
And Selena Gomez? Go troll elsewhere. All we have in common with the US is language, and even then not really.
Brits don’t want to go to random bumfuck towns. East coast destinations are NYC and Florida, and that’s pretty much it.
Flight prices and distances to start with. You can fly to Spain/Portugal/Italy/Greece for as little at £10 and between 1-3hours for flight. To the US, it’s 6or7 hour flight (minimum) and from £400-600 in economy.
I’ve been to the US loads of times and I love it. Problem is just the cost of the flight is equivalent to an all inclusive week in Spain. I could only afford it as I can stay with family. With the exchange rate as it is, visiting America is even more expensive. You’ve also got jet lag to worry about which ruins the first few days of the trip.
As for the more in common, we share a language but that’s about it. There is much less of a culture shock going to Spain or France than America.
The cost is the single biggest factor – Cheaper flights, essentially.
I’ve visited the US and Europe.
The US takes ages to get to and is way more expensive. If I have a week off work then a good two days of that is lost to traveling.
Invent a teleporter.
Ah, an American telling the British about Europeans. How many times have you left the country?
Go look at some history dude. The European’s helped build this country and make it what it is. We have more in common with them than the states.
Aside from language we have MUCH more in common with Central Europe than North America. I don’t know how other people feel but America feels like another planet to me, both in terms of distance and culture
A great big bag of money.
Probably quite a lot because Europe is cheaper to visit, so you would be asking people to pay a lot more.
I definitely think if you have someone like Brad Pitt advertising the tourism industry would get some people interested. It might not sway the people who were intending to go to a cheaper European destination (because money might have been a factor in their decision), but it might encourage others to go there in general.
Put away your guns and make your street safe so I can have a walk through your cities at night and use your public transport.
Divide the cost by a factor of 10
It is ludicrously cheap for us to go to Europe. I can get to Mallorca for less than I can get to London – and it doesn’t take much longer.
Getting to the US costs hundreds per person just for the flight, which takes at least 6-7 hours
Even when we go to the US it’s usually Florida or New York
No amount of advertising is going to convince to spend more money and extra hours flying to the mid west. If we travel that far we’re going to Californian or Vegas or the Grand Canyon
(I have probably been to much more of the US than most Brits – including Texas, Arizona, Georgia, Oregon and Ohio – but I went with work and also wouldn’t bother holidaying there, nice as they were)
It’s too far and too expensive for an average family to pop over for a week during school holidays.
Go to Spain/Portugal – you can easily get return tickets for a family of 4 for under £100 per head, and get there in 6ish hours door to door.
Go to America, and you need to spend 5 times that on flight tickets. You will also spend at least 12 hours door to door, and that’s if you live close to a major UK airport and want to fly to New York or Boston. And somehow don’t think those two cities are going to be cheaper than a week in Albufeiria!
Legal weed? Kinda not joking
“But what would it take to convince you Brits to stop visiting Majorca, Marbella, Costa del Sol, Portugal and visit some of our great cities instead – Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, New York City, Boston, Long Beach or our islands like American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands?”
For me, It would take millions of years to change the layout of the continents, so the flight time from the UK to America is 2-3h.
But I don’t have a few million years, so I will continue going to Europe.
I like the US, but this is never going to happen.
To add to the good reasons already given, I’ll add that the USA doesn’t have the easily accessible beach resorts within an hour’s transfer of a huge network of low cost airports served by multiple Uk airports. Also the US is far too dependent on having a car, and that doesn’t sit well with the typical British holiday requirement to get pissed.
Also, exchange rate. The US is very expensive to visit for us.
>Selena Gomez said it herself in a 2018 interview.
Well I thought we had more in common with our European neighbours, but now I see renowned geopolitical expert Selena Gomez says that’s incorrect I see the error of my ways!
The UK is already the non north-american country that sends the most tourists to the US.
Just devalue the dollar, and more will go.
I don’t even know who Selena Gomez is
Europe is nice
> we in our home state need the British tourists to visit.
Why though?
This has to be a piss take with that great, insightful comment on how we have more in common lmao.
But to answer your question, absolutely nothing. I have no desire to visit the US. There is nothing there of interest to me.
You’re trying to convince British people to go to St. Louis? Are you high? Most americans wouldn’t want to go to St. Louis. All you have is a stupid arch.
And the rest of Missouri is just farms and crazy fundy nutjob christians.
The flight time.
Also, I’ve been to St Louis.
You’ve got an arch, some half-decent breweries, and a big flat muddy river. Half the city you’re told to avoid because of crime, the rest of it just isn’t very interesting.
San Diego is great but wtf would I go on a 14-hour flight for a holiday when I could get Hispanic culture and beaches and the sunny weather in Spain in 90 minutes?
And don’t be lulled into thinking Brits are more like Americans just because we sort of speak the same language. The fear of government rather than thinking government is created by the people, for the people, is a huge cultural gulf. Ditto the much bigger amount of religion in the country that technically separates religion from government, not to mention in Europe the welfare state was created by Christians who felt it their duty to address poverty and lack of health care…
There’s lots of great bits of America and I’m American myself, but it’s a totally alien culture.
Well we are European and have an enormous amount of common history, that said we do share a language with our friends across the pond,
Obviously cost is a big implication, for us to visit the states is like a 7,8 or 9 hour flight not as cheap as an hour or so to Spain
Also about 5 million flights to the states each year suggest quite a large number of brits DO go to the USA but in a country as large as the states relatively few brits will be in any area off the Disney/grand canyon etc route.
Don’t forget a lot of brits are of Indian and Pakistan origin and will look that direction for holidays and then we have massive ties to Oz and New Zealand too,
Most people I know have been to the US and nearly all of them have done Vegas, I think that there is your primary issue ,getting them to go off the beaten track.
Obviously it’s expensive, and I prefer not to fly these days anyway. Set up a good and affordable ocean liner route like they used to have in the olden days and I’d consider it.
> Selena Gomez said it herself in a 2018 interview
How the hell would she know?
Short answer: almost nothing, please abandon this grotesque misadventure.
Long answer:
– People go on holiday to see somewhere exotic and different, not to see somewhere which is similar to their point of origin. “It’s like England but further away and more expensive to get to” isn’t selling it
– The people who *do* just want the same place they came from but with better weather to to Benidorm. Google it. It’s cheap and culturally identical to the UK because it’s been colonised by lobster-skinned English pensioners.
– You don’t even want us as tourists anyway. Seriously, we carve a trail of destruction wherever we go. The East India Company was originally a package holiday operator that got completely out of control. Also, our currency is almost at parity with the dollar so we don’t have the cash to burn in your absurdly oversized shopping malls.
– Lots of British tourists go to NYC and with good reason because it’s amazing. St Louis, not so much. Sorry, but let’s be realistic. In a post of “how do we persuade you to come to our home state”, you didn’t give a single reason for doing so. The only places worth visiting that you mentioned are literally thousands of miles away from St Louis and completely different. A campaign to promote American Samoa and a campaign to promote Missouri are not the same campaign.
– I have never, ever, at any moment in my life, asked myself what Selena Gómez thinks. About *anything*.
Is Selena Gomez suddenly supposed to be an authority on European and British culture or something? Have I missed something? Am I actually still asleep and just dreaming this weird-ass question? Anyone?
Apart from a big arch (woo yeah!) what cultural experiences are we missing by not visiting St. Louis, Missouri anyway? I mean maybe if you guys got yourself a telephone museum or something cool like that I might be interested.
My fiance doesn’t like flying. I’m not sure if he would ever do a transatlantic flight or go to Asia or Australia. He hasn’t been abroad many times and has only done flights that are 1-2 hours long.
Also from my perspective, because the flights are longer, they use more fuel and more crew time, so are always going to be more expensive than flying to Europe. And to go somewhere like the Americas or Asia, you lose a whole day at each end of the holiday, to just travelling and end up exhausted. I might have an early start for an European holiday, but I can be checked into the hotel and have dinner there at a reasonable time that evening.
I also end up jet lagged when I’ve gone to the Americas and Asia and when I return home. I don’t get jet lagged going to Europe.
So part of it is nothing specifically against the USA, it’s long distance travel in general.
Blackjack and hookers.
Blackjack and hookers.
We can be in Europe in a couple of hours very cheaply. The cities tend to be quite walkable with pretty countryside and beaches nearby, lots of history, interesting (yet somewhat familiar) food. I mean, *Guam*, how on earth would we even get there! Pretty much couldn’t get further away. I thought a lot of Brits do visit American cities but for different reasons than they maybe visit Majorca. We could ask the question the other way round, why don’t Americans visit Manchester, Newcastle, Cornwall or islands like Jersey and St Helena?
Well, there are two points of difficulty for me.
1) The USA is far away and Europe is close. Given the time zone issue, you lose time out of your holiday to travel there, and the flight is likely more expensive. You can, or you used to be able to in the era of cheap flights, go to another European country just for a day trip.
2) Not everyone feels as you do that British people are not European culturally, and are more American. Although I love a lot of American culture (e.g. a lot of TV shows, a lot of films, and Henry James and Wallace Stevens), I am nevertheless much more European in my tastes and I speak four European foreign languages fluently. I didn’t even know who Selena Gomez is- I had to look her up.
Disregarding all the bait nonsense – When you get £30 flights.
The flights alone cost several times the entire cost of a holiday in Europe.