Anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock will know that there’s a royal wedding about to take place in London, with Prince William marrying Kate Middleton on April 29, 2011.

VisitBritain Royal Wedding

London is gearing up for an invasion of 600,000 domestic and international visitors on the wedding day. The number of visitors for the month of April are up 10 to 20 percent, compared to last year.

The television audience for the event, which is going to be telecast live, is expected to be in the two billion ballpark.

Whenever there’s a mega-event like this one, the relative tourism marketing organization (VisitBritain, in this case) is under immense pressure to milk the event and give tourism a permanent boost.

VisitBritain has been busy with pages dedicated to the royal wedding and tools like Royal Wedding Predictor, which allows users to guess details of the day and has a large fan following on Facebook.

Apart from the website and social media buzz, Meredith Pearson from VisitBritain’s U.S. office tells Forbes and TravelWeekly what else the organization is doing and what it hasn’t been able to do.

The traditional advertising campaign that targets the captive audience at these events is sadly missing. They’re not running advertisements crafted for the wedding and neither is there going to be a boost in regular advertising. VisitBritain can’t afford it, having had their budget slashed by 30 percent over the next four years.

The organization was supposed to kick off a four-year $100 million tourism marketing campaign in May right after the wedding. But the “Britain, You’re Invited” campaign’s U.S. launch has now been pushed back to the fall. The campaign is built around capitalizing on the royal wedding, the Queen’s Jubilee and the 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games.

Pearson explained that the amount of free exposure Britain is getting currently is phenomenal, so funds will be better spent in the fall. Right now, VisitBritain is focusing on media relations, steering the media and networks to cover the rest of Britain outside of London. It even has a “Top 10 Kate Middleton and Prince William Locations” page on its website.

According to multiple U.K.-based research organizations, the impact of the wedding on the economy could be anywhere between $839 million (Center for Retail Research) to $1 billion (Verdict Research). Of this, $585 million goes to food and grocery retailers, while tourism and travel takes $351 million.

The 600,000 visitors on the day of the wedding are predicted to spend between $50 and $80 million. But this temporary boost can’t come anywhere close to making up for the $6.64 billion loss to the economy, because April 29 was declared as a bank holiday.

That loss could have been offset somewhat by a permanent uptick in tourism if VisitBritain had been allowed to target the royal-wedding audience directly with advertisements. As things stand, it has to depend on the media and hope to push Britain as a destination via the coverage linked to the event.

Photo – VisitBritain.com

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