Travel trends: 2024

• Overseas residents made an estimated 42.6 million visits to the UK in 2024 and spent an estimated £32.5 billion.

• UK residents made an estimated 94.6 million visits abroad in 2024 and spent an estimated £78.6 billion.

• The greatest number of estimated visits to Great Britain (GB) in 2024 were made by residents of the United States (5.6 million visits), followed by residents of France (3.6 million visits) and Germany (3.3 million visits).

• Spain was estimated to be the most visited country by residents of GB in 2024 (17.8 million visits), followed by France (9.3 million visits) and Italy (4.8 million visits).

• Annual 2024 estimates consist of Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) and Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2024 data collected and produced under our previous International Passenger Survey (IPS) design, and Quarter 3 (July to Sept) and Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2024 data collected and produced under our new design.

• Estimates are published as official statistics in development as we continue to establish methods to produce estimates from our new data collection design, and investigate and resolve issues that have arisen.

• Estimates can provide general insights into overseas travel and tourism in 2024, but users should refer to specific advice provided in the data sources and quality section before using these estimates.

Overseas residents

An overseas resident is a person who permanently resides outside the UK.

Visits

The figures for visits relate to the number of completed visits, not the number of visitors. Anyone entering or leaving more than once in the same period would be counted on each visit.

Developing our travel and tourism statistics

These estimates are labelled as "official statistics in development" to reflect the ongoing development of our travel and tourism statistics. Our Improving our travel and tourism statistics article series provides further information on the data collection changes and methodological developments we are undertaking. Once these developments are complete, we will decide whether the statistics are of sufficient quality and value to be published as "official statistics", or if further development is needed. Once published as official statistics, our next step will be to work towards becoming "accredited official statistics".

This Travel trends: 2024 article is accompanied by our Improving our travel and tourism statistics: August 2025 update, which outlines the methodological and quality assurance work completed since our last update in June 2025. It also sets out our planned next steps to develop and refine our travel and tourism statistics.

Several data quality issues were present in the Quarter 3 (July to Sept) and Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2024 provisional estimates published on 13 June 2025. Three of these data quality issues have been resolved in the quarterly and annual estimates shared in this article. These resolved issues relate to incorrectly assigning a Northern Ireland postcode to GB, incorrectly grouping total fares and spend across variables, and incorrectly including some non-tourists in Quarter 4 data. The following issues remain in the estimates shared in this article:

• assigning an incorrect airport code to a small proportion of International Passenger Survey (IPS) cases

• incorrectly reporting some GB residents' overseas pre-departure accommodation spend as post-departure accommodation spend

• differences in the proportion of visits via sea transport being attributed to overseas residents

• missing "Fly/Cruise stay on board" spend information for GB residents

These issues affect Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2024 estimates, and therefore are present in the annual 2024 estimates.

Incorrect airport codes were assigned for 7% to 7.5% of Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2024 data, meaning some country-level estimates may be underestimated or overestimated for GB and overseas residents. We have implemented improvements at the data collection stage, which means this issue will be resolved for Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025 estimates onwards.

Some Great Britain Tourism Survey (GBTS) respondents, used to collect post-departure spend of GB residents abroad, may be including their pre-departure accommodation spend in their reported post-departure accommodation spend. We have removed all post-departure accommodation spend from our data while we investigate this issue. Therefore, it is likely that GB residents' overseas spend estimates are underestimated in Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2024. We are using cognitive interviewing to investigate this issue, and will identify and implement improvements where appropriate.

Our new approach is attributing a lower proportion of total visits via sea transport to overseas residents, and consequently attributing a higher proportion to GB residents in Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2024 compared with our previous approach. As such, estimates of overseas resident visits via sea transport are likely smaller than they would have been under the previous approach. We will continue to investigate the survey design and administrative data used for calibration to better understand this difference.

As part of our investigation into confidence intervals for GB residents estimates for the "Fly/Cruise stay on board" category, we have identified that we do not ask GBTS respondents about their transport method to join a cruise. As such, the spend estimate for this category will be underestimated, as it will not include post-departure spend. We will therefore not be publishing "Fly/Cruise stay on board" spend estimates or confidence intervals for GB residents in this release. We recommend the provisional estimates published in Overseas travel and tourism, provisional: July to September and October to December 2024 are not used, as they will also be underestimated. We will investigate the feasibility of capturing this information as part of our ongoing development work.

We have identified that spend information captured on the IPS for the "holiday - inclusive tours" category was not correctly assigned for some respondents. This occurred in our provisional Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) and Quarter 2 2024 estimates, published in July 2024 and October 2024, respectively. As a result, "holiday - inclusive tours" spend was underestimated. We have corrected this in the estimates published in this release, resulting in a noticeable increase in inclusive tour holidays spend estimates in the revised Quarter 1 and Quarter 2 2024 estimates.

We are sharing our developing estimates as official statistics in development to support the release of timely and relevant statistics while we continue to resolve these issues. We are confident the developing estimates published in this article are relevant and provide useful insights into travel and tourism in 2024. However, they should not be directly compared with estimates produced from our old design while we continue to develop them. When interpreting these estimates, users should be aware of the potential effects of these data issues on the estimates. These include:

• the underestimation or overestimation of some country-level estimates for visits, spend, and nights for GB and overseas residents

• the underestimation of GB residents overseas spend estimates

• smaller visit estimates for overseas residents travelling via sea transport compared with our previous approach

Where estimates are accompanied by confidence intervals, these can be used to help understand the uncertainty around the estimates. Caution should be taken when interpreting estimates where confidence intervals are not currently provided.

Further details on these data quality issues are available in Section 5: Data considerations for quarterly and annual 2024 estimates in our Improving our travel and tourism statistics: August 2025 update.

Creating the Travel trends 2024 dataset

As set out in our June 2024 article, the data collection and methodology changes forming our travel and tourism transformation work were implemented from 1 July 2024. As such, data and estimates from Quarter 1 and Quarter 2 2024 were collected and produced under our previous IPS design, and data and estimates from Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2024 were collected and produced under our new design.

We have combined data from these four quarters to create annual 2024 datasets, which means 2024 estimates are produced under two different designs. We considered it appropriate to merge these datasets as survey weights were calculated independently for each quarter with quarterly estimates aggregated to create the annual estimates. Confidence intervals were calculated separately for each quarter, accounting for the differences in survey design.

The annual 2024 datasets published in this article incorporate Northern Ireland (NI) travel and tourism data provided by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) for the first time, combining aggregate NI data with GB data produced using our new IPS design. From this, we can produce UK-level estimates for visits, spend, and nights headline estimates for overseas residents visiting the UK, and UK residents visiting countries abroad. These are for the world totals only, with the remaining estimates and breakdowns in the annual 2024 datasets representing GB-level estimates from our IPS design.

Uncertainty measures of travel and tourism

We provide 95% confidence intervals for the headline travel and tourism estimates included in this article. These intervals mean that if we drew 100 random samples and calculated a 95% confidence interval for each sample, we would expect 95 of them to contain the true population value. A wider interval indicates more uncertainty in the estimate. The confidence intervals for data used in this article can be found in the accompanying datasets (Section 2: Data on travel trends 2024).

More information on how we measure uncertainty is available on our uncertainty and how we measure it for our surveys page.

Users should take caution when interpreting estimates where confidence intervals are not currently provided.