Not one, but two recent trade visits to China – by George Osborne and Boris Johnson – inspired UK tourism marketing agency VisitBritain to plan to more than double the number of Chinese visitors to this country.
It’s an unquestionably ambitious project. Last year, the UK welcomed fewer than 180,000 Chinese visitors; VisitBritain is aiming for more than 380,000 by 2016.
That gives rise to a wider concern. The hospitality industry is all about customer service, and that’s extremely difficult to provide if you can’t understand what the customer wants in the first place – and how many of us have even a smattering of Mandarin?
And of course, that doesn’t apply only to our friends from China. We Brits are notorious monoglots, and that’s an issue that needs to be addressed if we are to win and retain more international business.
It doesn’t take much to have menus, for example, translated into some of the more widely-used languages.
And, since you asked, the Chinese for “breakfast” is “z?oc?n”!