Inbound visits and spend: annual, regional

The International Passenger Survey (IPS) is a continuous survey carried out by the Office for National Statistics (ONS). It covers all major air, sea and tunnel ports, providing detailed information on the numbers and types of visits made by people travelling to and from the UK.

From January to June 2022, the ONS was unable to restart interviewing at Eurotunnel due to COVID-19 restrictions so data for those travelling via this port is excluded for this time period. Interviewing at Eurostar was not affected by COVID-19 restrictions during this period. The ONS restarted IPS interviews at all ports from July 2022.

An important note about the survey’s methodology when interpreting regional data:

• Visitors who spend at least one night in the UK during their trip are asked where they stayed. This information can 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 IPS 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 ‘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 or 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 IPS.

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.

Please see About IPS for further information and the ONS.