Competition is heating up in Europe to attract more tourists from the BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India and China — whose economies are expanding while the Europeans are standing still.

Banking on the added appeal of Britain as a holiday destination following a successful London Olympic Games, the British government is to spend $12.5 million on a marketing campaign that aims to triple the number of visitors from China.

France and Germany are currently ahead in the race for the Chinese market, as Jeremy Hunt, the British culture minister acknowledged when he announced the extra funding on Tuesday.

A local news website in Rouen, France recently noted that visitors from the BRICs were “the new face of tourism” in the historic capital of the Normandy region. Apparently the Brazilians find the Norman countryside “exotic,” while the Russians like the local Calvados brandy.

Local officials have been traveling to Brazil and China over the past two years to drum up yet more business.

It is the same phenomenon in Spain, where Barcelona saw an increase in spending by BRIC visitors in an otherwise stagnant year, with many of them on the lookout for duty free goods.

"The Russians are still the biggest buyers but the Chinese aren’t far behind,”said the head of a local trade association.

We already wrote how Chinese shoppers were helping to revive Europe’s battered retail sector with record spending on upmarket brands during the Chinese New Year holiday.

A travel industry survey this month showed Russia leading the BRIC rankings for overseas travel. Russians took 1.3 times as many trips as the Chinese, 3.4 times as many as Indians, and 4.6 times as many as Brazilians, according to e-Travel Blackboard.

That added up to 54 million trips in 2011, still far below those made by European citizens who made 345 million visits in the same year.

"The tourism figures for the BRIC countries, in particular for Russia, are very promising for the tourism industries of the host countries and destinations,” said Martin Buck, a German travel industry executive. "They show that the BRIC countries are now catching up, not only economically but as well in terms of outbound trips.”

The tourism industry hopes these markets will help counteract a stay-at-home trend this year among Europeans hit by the financial crisis. Swiss government statistics quoted by Reuters recently revealed that overnight hotel stays by Europeans fell 4.6 percent in May but those by mainland Chinese rose by 34 percent in the same month.