In search of data

Once upon a time in a faraway land the Office for National Statistics published provisional monthly estimates for the volume and value of inbound and outbound tourism six weeks after that month had reached its end. Ten weeks after the end of each quarter more granular data would emerge into the daylight to be pored over by those with a keen interest in tourism data.

This bucolic era appears to have entered a dormant state, and it is to be hoped that it is not now extinct.

We have to wait until 18th October before any data whatsoever is released to shine a light on inbound and outbound tourism trends in the April to June period of this year, by which time most will be thinking about prospects for 2025 as opposed to what was happening last spring.

All is not lost, as there are a number of data sources, most of which we could term administrative, that go some way to filling this knowledge void.

When the words data and border are used in relation to the Home Office it tends to be in the context of migration, whether legal or illegal, but what tends to go under the radar is a raft of figures that go some way to indicating how inbound and outbound tourism is performing.

Back in the third week of August the latest tranche of figures for monthly passenger arrivals at the UK border was released, taking the series up to June of this year. There are a few caveats to note; arrivals from within the Common Travel Area (that’s Ireland, Isle of Man, Guernsey and Jersey) are excluded, figures are rounded to the nearest thousand, if more than one interaction takes place with the same passenger all interactions will be counted, and most importantly from the perspective of a tourism interpretation the data will include those arriving for reasons other than tourism.

Nonetheless, we can look at the story for this year versus the same period of last year, which indicates that in June the number of foreign arrivals at the UK border was 7% up on the same month of 2023, and across the first half of this year the volume is 8% higher than last year. For British arrivals (a large proportion of which will be folk returning from an outbound tourism trip) the equivalent figures are a 10% uptick in June and an increase of 11% in the first half of this year.

One of the oddities of the Covid-19 era was that the government published all manner of data, and one series was daily arrivals at the border broken down by British and foreign arrivals. Sadly, publication at this level ceased in 2022, a shame as it’s highly useful at detailing how flows vary by day of week etc.

Again courtesy of the Home Office we can dig into figures on the number of visas applied for, issued and refused on a quarterly basis. Many visa types are not relevant to the tourism sector, but some are, including the visitor visa. The latest figures for April to June of this year reveal that 729,711 visitor visas were issued, up 16% on a year ago.

Of the visitor visas issued in Q2 of this year 201,810 were to those with Chinese nationality, representing 28% of all such visas issued in the quarter and being 35% up on the same three months of 2023. The nationalities occupying the remaining spots within the top five in the latest quarter are India (196,253, 27% of the total), Turkey (52,873, 7%), South Africa (28,635, 4%) and Pakistan (27,387, 4%).

The figure for visitor visas issued to those coming from China remains 14% shy of the record set in the second quarter of 2019 but does suggest that this market is finally making a substantial comeback.

For the final source that I’ll cover we need to turn our attention to the other side of the North Atlantic, but despite that it still helps illuminate how inbound tourism here is performing.

The US International Trade Administration has a fabulous data portal that allows information based on the Advance Passenger Information System to be interrogated.

It is possible to look at the flow of passengers on direct international routes serving the US broken down by country (within which further splits are available by individual foreign airport), US airport, direction of travel, whether the airline carried a US or foreign flag, and crucially how many of the passengers were US citizens and how many were foreign citizens.

No source of data ever does quite what we would want it to, and this is no exception, as some US citizens who board a plane in the US destined to land at an airport in the UK will be transiting to somewhere outside the UK, plus some may be travelling to the UK for a trip purpose that doesn’t fall into the trip purpose bucket emblazoned with the word tourism. But what we do know is that these figures provide a highly accurate measure for US citizens stepping off an aircraft on UK territory.

In July of this year 592,275 US citizens departed the US on an aircraft set to land somewhere in the UK, up by 4% from 565,248 July last year, and 11.6% higher than in July 2019 when the tally stood at 530,652.

The vast majority of the US citizen arrivals are at Heathrow (516,943 this July), where a hefty proportion may well be jetting off to another country once they have followed the purple signs to Flight Connections and passed through security checks – in a typical year slightly more than one-third of passengers passing through Heathrow are there simply to connect between flights.

However, we can discover from the data that in July 29,908 US citizens got on a plane in the US that was destined to land at Edinburgh, where very few would be connecting to another international destination. This figure was just over 1,100 up on July 2023 and almost 10,000 higher than had been the case back in July 2019 when it was 19,983.

So, while our cup doth not overflow with up-to-date officially badged inbound and outbound tourism stats at present, if you’re willing to do a spot of rummaging in unusual places you never know what you might find.