NATIONAL
Japanese best tourists in Europe, according to survey of hoteliers

Wednesday, June 6, 2007 at 06:50 EDT

LONDON — Japanese tourists are the best in Europe, according to a recent survey of hoteliers across the continent. They came top of a league table following a questionnaire of 15,000 hotel owners who were asked, during a two-week period in April, to rate a selection of nations across a range of categories.
Hoteliers across Europe were asked to vote for countries based on such things as cleanliness, generosity, noise, behavior and spending power.
Second in the league table of best tourists came the Americans followed by the Swiss. The worst tourists in Europe were judged to be the French — due to their unwillingness to speak the local language, lack of generosity and impoliteness — followed by the Indians, Chinese, Russians and British.
In the breakdown of the results, the Japanese were judged to be the best behaved, closely followed by the Germans. They were also judged to be the quietest of nations.
Japanese scored well in terms of spending money, where the Americans came out on top.
Japanese were considered to be the third best nation for tipping and came second, behind the Germans, in the cleanliness category.
They were also judged to be the most polite and least complaining.
Surprisingly, for a nation which tends to believe that it cannot speak foreign languages, the Japanese were thought to be quite good at using local languages when on vacation.
The Japanese were judged to be the best tourists in each of the 12 European countries where hoteliers were questioned, apart from in Norway where they came second.
The survey was prepared by the online travel agent Expedia. (Kyodo News)

http://www.japantoday.com/jp/news/408550