Chinese check-ins

WEMBLEY is not London’s most appealing suburb. The area around the stadium is untidy and architecturally uninspired—good for facilitating the movement of tens of thousands of football fans, but hardly a place to linger. The shops of the West End are a 25-minute tube journey away. To Chinese tour groups, though, hotels there like the Holiday Inn and the Ibis are honeypots.

In 2011 some 150,000 Chinese tourists made it to Britain, compared with 3.6m visitors from France. Their numbers are growing fast, though, rising by 35% from 2010 to 2011 and 20% year-on-year in the first 11 months of 2012, according to VisitBritain, the national tourist board. To lure more visitors, Theresa May, the home secretary, is moving to simplify the process of applying for visas—something that currently puts off many Chinese. With China’s total outbound market likely to be three times as big as Japan’s by 2020, according to the Boston Consulting Group, the British government is reluctant to miss out on a lot of potential shoppers.