International visitors make it to just about every corner of Britain during the course of the year. Explore full year data using the filter options on the graphs and charts below.
Please note that visitors sometimes spend nights in more than one location during their trip. This means that 'visits' figures will not necessarily sum to the national total (eg. visits to London + visits to rest of England > visits to total England). Expenditure data in the CSV file excludes spending of nil-nights transit visitors to the UK and visitors departing directly from the Channel Islands.
Inbound tourism to Britain by area
Note: To filter data, please use a desktop rather than mobile device
Use these filters to update the charts and tables below
Visitors who spend at least one night in the UK during their trip are asked where they stayed. This information can then be aggregated to look at the number of visits, nights, and spending in different regions, cities, and towns.
Information at the regional level is often based on very small sample sizes, and as such should be treated with extreme caution, and used solely as an indicative estimate. The International Passenger Survey is a national survey, and is not designed to be statistically robust at the regional level.
Visitors often spend nights in more than one location during their trip. This means that when looking at ‘visits’ values for different regions will not sum to the national total – for example a visitor from the US making a single visit to the UK could be counted as making a ‘staying visit’ to London, to Edinburgh and to Chester.
The data includes a ‘Total UK’ category, representing the true national total for visits.
‘Double counting’ is not an issue when looking at visitor nights or spending.
No information is recorded about where visitors arriving/departing the UK on the same day travel during their trip, nor is information recorded about where ‘staying visitors’ go for ‘day trips’. If a visitor from France spends four nights in Edinburgh they may take a day trip to St Andrews and another to Stirling, but this information will not be recorded in the International Passenger Survey.
A note on the English regions
Data for each of the English regions can be viewed individually, or at an aggregated level.
The aggregated levels available are:
Rest of England: all regions outside London combined
England's North Country: North East, North West and Yorkshire combined
Central England: West Midlands, East Midlands and East of England combined
Southern England: South East and South West combined
The Discover England Fund has also produced this report looking at the profile of inbound visits which include two or more destinations, both "London plus" trips and trips involving multiple destinations outside the capital. The multi destination trips report can be downloaded here PDF (1.1MB). Published February 2017
