While the retail offer draws international visitors into London’s West End’s retail district to shop, the retailing experience is critical to its global reputation and driving repeat visits. The shopper ‘experience’ was assessed via the location surveys focusing on those responses related to ease of shopping, connectivity, service levels and directional signage. Based on this assessment the West End scored well being a European leader as it outperformed Paris and Milan, and ranked fourth across the Global Cities (see Figure 11).

^{Source: The Retail Group}

The individual survey metrics that made up the aggregate shopping experience score for London’s West End’s retail district is detailed in Figure 12. On the whole London’s West End scored very well across all the individual metrics. Its key strength areas are ‘ease of shopping’, ‘connectivity to attractions and ‘service levels in shops’ with the proportion of respondents stating it as good to very good slightly above the Global City average.

When compared to the average across the top three scoring shopper experience cities (Hong Kong, New York and Dubai), London’s West End underperformed bar that for ‘ease of shopping’. The biggest rating gap between London’s West End and the top three Global Cities is for the public realm feature of directional signage, a feature that could be easily improved through greater investment.

^{Source: The Retail Group}