Hoteliers rate British tourists the worst behaved in Europe, but the second best worldwide, according to the Expedia Best Tourist Index.
The survey said UK tourists are messy, likely to complain, and are poor tippers in the eyes of European hoteliers. But they are polite, well-behaved and generous beyond the Continent, where hoteliers said Brits are second-only to Italians in their dress sense.
The annual survey ranked travellers’ behaviour abroad by nationality, based on the opinions of 4,500 hoteliers worldwide.
British tourists were runners up to the Japanese as the best tourists worldwide for a second consecutive year, yet they were rated the worst in Europe for a third successive year. Japanese visitors were rated as the quietest, cleanest, most polite, and least likely to complain.
UK hoteliers had a particularly poor opinion of tourists from their own country; one in five rated domestic visitors the worst in the world. A similar proportion considered them the most noisy.
Expedia.co.uk head of product marketing Jonathan Cudworth said: “We have not managed to shrug off the Brits abroad label. We have a job to do to convince our European counterparts we can be better behaved on holiday.”