Overseas travel and tourism, provisional: January to March 2024

• Overseas residents made an estimated 8.7 million visits to Great Britain in Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2024 and spent an estimated £5.5 billion.

• Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 16.7 million visits outside the UK in Quarter 1 2024 and spent an estimated £10.1 billion.

• Northern Ireland travel and tourism data are not included in the estimates for this quarter, but will be included in our annual estimates for 2024.

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 is counted on each visit.

Visits by overseas residents

A visit by an overseas resident is a visit for a period of less than 12 months. UK citizens residing overseas for 12 months or more coming home on leave are included in this category.

Visits outside the UK by residents of Great Britain

Visits for a period of less than 12 months by people permanently residing in Great Britain, who may be of foreign nationality.

Visiting multiple countries

When a resident of Great Britain has visited more than one country, expenditure and stay are allocated to the country that they stayed in for the longest time.

Reduced release for July 2024

We are carrying out a detailed quality assurance review of our travel and tourism data. While we conduct this review, we have published a shortened bulletin with a reduced set of data tables.

We plan to publish the rest of our quarterly and monthly estimates for Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2024 in our next release, scheduled for October 2024. We will publish sooner if our quality assurance review is completed.

More quality and methodology information on strengths, limitations, appropriate uses, and how the data were created is available in our International Passenger Survey (IPS) Quality and Methodology Information (QMI).

Change from UK to Great Britain in quarterly publications

The coverage of the travel and tourism data we publish in our quarterly publications is changing from UK to Great Britain.

Previously, we have published estimates of:

• overseas residents visiting the UK

• UK residents visiting abroad

Our quarterly estimates from Quarter 1 2024 onwards will be for:

• overseas residents visiting Great Britain

• residents of Great Britain visiting places outside the UK

You can read more about this change and the reasons behind it in our Improving our travel and tourism statistics: changes from July 2024 article.

UK estimates

Estimates for UK travel and tourism will be published on an annual basis, alongside our annual Travel Trends articles.

Accuracy of the International Passenger Survey estimates

Our latest quarterly datasets contain estimates from Quarter 1 2019 to Quarter 1 2024, as well as annual estimates for 2019 to 2023.

Estimates for the whole of 2020 must be treated with caution. This is because no data were collected for Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2020 to Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2020 because of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Estimates for this year are based on models using passenger numbers and IPS trend data.

Estimates provided for 2021 and the start of 2022 should also be treated with caution, because the numbers are smaller than pre-pandemic years.

Collection of overseas travel and tourism data

The main data source for the Quarter 1 2024 estimates is the IPS data.

Survey interviews are carried out at air and sea ports, on board vessels leaving or returning to the UK, and on board the Eurotunnel trains. Interviews are carried out on all days of the year, apart from Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and New Year's Day.

Change from 1 July 2024

From 1 July 2024, we moved away from the IPS being our main source of overseas travel and tourism data. We are now using several different surveys and data collection methods to measure overseas travel and tourism. The first estimates using the transformed system will be for Quarter 3 (July to Sept) 2024. These will be published at the beginning of 2025. Further details on these changes are available in our Improving our travel and tourism statistics: July 2024 article.