Business travellers will benefit from improved transport facilities, better service in hotels and restaurants and a greater choice of meetings venues from the London Olympics.
The UK capital’s hotels have also been “spoken to” regarding charging rates which would discourage people attending the event next summer, Paul Deighton, ceo of the London Organising Committee Olympic Games 2012 (LOCOG), said today (June 23).
Deighton, speaking at the Business Travel Market in London said the Games would transform the London’s East End where most of the new venues and Olympic Village were being built.
A sum of £7bn was being spent on improving the city’s transport infrastructure including CrossRail, a new route which would link the area directly to London Heathrow Airport.
Deighton set his Olympic team had also been working with hotels and restaurants to improve levels of hospitality and enable staff to “do better” in terms of service.
“We are also working closely with hotels for a guarantee price formula,” he said. London had a reputation of being an expensive city which did not give people a reason to stay there.
“We are working with hotels so we can educate them. We will have 20,000 accredited media covering the events and 20,000 other media milling around. This will affect how they will tell their stories,” Deighton said.
One of the legacies of the Games, he said, is that the East End will be left with sports venues, parklands, shopping centres and hotels. “There will be more interesting places to go rather than the same old places in the West End,” Deighton said.
Surveys of past Games suggested that spending in the host city rose was about £1.5bn higher five years after the Games compared with five years before.
“They have a d substantial impact over the broad period of time,” he said.