You can travel cheaply and comfortably to almost any corner of the world. The welcome (and weather) is likely to be warm, and consumer satisfaction, in what is now the world’s biggest industry, is regarded as paramount.When you return from your week in the sun, put yourself in the position of a new arrival to these shores. Try it, as I did one recent morning at Gatwick airport.Bleary travellers bound for London have to battle with a rail system entangled with political dogma. You just want a quick journey to the capital; but the Government insists that you first evaluate the competing claims of the Gatwick Express, Network SouthCentral and Thameslink, all running trains on the same rails to London.Eventually (on non-strike days) you reach Victoria – home of Britain’s biggest tourist information office. Tourist offices in all the world’s great cities hand out city plans to new arrivals, recognising that a map guides a person and their purse. Ask for one in London, though, and you will be told to use a dispensing machine, charging pounds 1 for a flimsy publication.Your hotel, when you finally track it down, may be like the one I stayed in recently: yes, there was a tiny television, bolted high up on the nicotine-yellow wall, but to watch it you have to stick 50p in the slot.

Fawlty Towers could only have been located in England.You call for a cut in VAT to stimulate tourism, but the problem is one of tact, not tax. Unless we can put some substance behind the ‘Welcome’ signs, our share of the pounds 210bn tourism industry will continue to dwindle.Even when almost everyone has gone elsewhere, though, one city will still supply a sliver of invisible income. The couple I chatted to as we stood amid the litter in the guard’s van between Gatwick and Victoria were sanguine about the shabby treatment that greeted their first visit to Britain ‘We’re used to this shit We’re from New York.’Simon Calder. If you typed in a URL, please make sure you have typed it correctly.

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}. SARAH LEE, 27, is a press officer for the development charity ActionAid and shares a flat in London with friends. She recently spent a year working on Aids and HIV projects in Zimbabwe and last week returned from 10 days in Rwanda

I saw things which you would never want anyone to see.

The depth of suffering in Rwanda is beyond belief.
I watched a baby of about six months die in the medical tent He was receiving all the care that was available His breathing became very intense and then stopped. It was hard witnessing the end of a life, when it should have been the beginning.I had one woman come up to me and beg me to take her child She spoke a bit of French and so did I. She said: ‘I want to give you my daughter.’ The little girl was about two. She kept saying: ‘Take her, take her.’ I took them to the medical tent, because there was little else I could do.The image that will stay with me the longest is that of a child of about 18 months, clinging to her mother, whom I had seen die of cholera moments earlier.The scale of the death, dying and suffering overwhelmed all your senses – your sight, smell, feel and touch Just thinking of the smell makes me retch. When the cholera first broke out, they were unable to collect the corpses quickly enough. It became difficult to tell the living from the dead.When I came back to London, my organisation offered me counselling and I have found that useful; I have a lot of experiences and thoughts which I need to process.I got ill out there, like almost everyone else: acute sinusitis from the dust stirred up when the planes landed.