Former Tourism Society chairman David Jeffries has died at the age of 90.
Jeffries, who earned an OBE at the age of 37, founded the English Tourist Board (ETB) and was affectionately known as the “father of the short break” among tourism colleagues.
The first in his family to attend university, his degree in modern (Hispanic) languages from Sheffield University earned him a graduate post in 1955 at the British Travel Association (forerunner to the British Tourist Authority/VisitBritain) with a responsibility to guide overseas marketing activity by researching the markets for visits to Britain.
In 1965, he was appointed manager of the organisation’s Paris office where he initiated several schemes, including on encouraging Parisians to take weekends away in London. Another scheme built foundations for language school tourism. A third transformed the perception of Northern Ireland by national media in France. Shortly afterwards, he was awarded an OBE.
Jeffries returned to London in 1970 as founding marketing director of the ETB. He stayed 13 years, leading several different marketing initiatives and used his experience gained in Paris to build the ‘Let’s Go’ scheme for weekends within England.
Hotels had mainly been used by business travellers and had very low weekend occupancy. By the peak of the campaign, about 1,000 hotels had joined ‘Let’s Go’.
Other hotel groups and several holiday operating companies followed suit and launched their own products. Meanwhile, Jeffries helped launch tourist information centres, hotel classification schemes and the Tudor rose symbol in English accommodation.
Jeffries later worked as a professor of tourism at the University of Strathclyde, and visiting professor at Surrey and City Universities. He developed a framework for defining the tourism product and first expressed a need for a definition in a paper to the British Travel Association in 1968.
In the last decade of his career, Jeffries advised the European Commission and numerous governments of developing countries, such as Nicaragua, Senegal and Western Samoa. This culminated in his textbook, published in 2001, called Governments and Tourism.