THE Olympics will bring no lasting benefit to British tourism and may cause damage to the industry, according to a report released yesterday.

Nations that have previously hosted the Games have suffered declines in tourism growth in the years surrounding the event, the study from the European Tour Operators Association shows.

It claims that visitors at Olympic events are “sports fans”, with different spending habits from other tourists who devote much of their trip to leisure activities. The behaviour of Olympics attendees was “akin to business visitors attending a convention”, making them unlikely to spend money on visiting museums, theatres and monuments.

Theme park owners in Los Angeles saw a decline in revenue during the 1984 Games, while in Sydney in 2000, regular attractions also experienced a downturn, the study claims.

Tom Jenkins, the executive director of the association, said that the Olympics could threaten the “conveyor belt” of visitors coming to Britain. “The great rolling circus that hits town during the Olympics does not help tourism and perhaps hinders it. The Olympics deter regular tourists, scaring them away for some time, as they perceive that the city will be full, overpriced and congested.”

The association said that this “Olympic effect” was also apparent in the Games at Seoul (1988), Barcelona (1992) and Atlanta (1996). Full details for Athens, which staged the 2004 Olympics, are not yet available, but the association said that one month before the Games visitor arrivals to Greece were 12 per cent down.

The report says: “Such locations as Wembley, Wimbledon, St John’s Wood and Kennington have not become major non-sporting resorts. Much of their charm lies in their ability to return rapidly to a surburban normality after the fans depart.”

Visit London, which supported the bid, disputed the report’s findings, saying that tourism would receive a real boost from the Olympics, which it expected to contribute £2 billion in revenue. A spokeswoman said: “In South-East Asia for example, where there will be a real interest in the Games, it will trigger an interest in the broader appeal of London beyond sport, which will have great benefits in the long-term.”

A spokesman from London 2012 said: “Sports tourism is one of the biggest-growing areas in the world. Of course it requires careful planning and hard work but with that, all the findings show that it can have huge economic benefits.”