16 August 2022

We have identified an issue with data collected from the International Passenger Survey (IPS) in 2021, linked to challenges collecting and publishing consistent data during the pandemic.

After correcting this issue, total visits to the UK by Overseas’ residents show an increase from 6.2 million to 6.4 million. The number of nights has fallen from 99.3 million to 93.5 million and spend has also fallen from £5.8 billion to £5.6 billion. 

UK residents made 19.1 million visits abroad in 2021, which is unchanged, the number of nights increased from 336.9 million to 340.9 million.

There are however, bigger impacts to visitor and spend data at individual country level. These errors have been corrected within the relevant data tables.

This affects the following releases:

Travel trends: 2021
Overseas travel and tourism: April 2022 provisional results

Corrections have been made to the main points, commentary and accompanying data tables.

Publication of our monthly and quarterly overseas travel and tourism releases will resume as soon as possible.

We apologise for the inconvenience.