Travel trends: 2024

• Overseas residents made an estimated 42.6 million visits to the UK in 2024 and spent an estimated £31.6 billion.

• UK residents made an estimated 94.6 million visits abroad in 2024 and spent an estimated £78.7 billion.

• The greatest number of estimated visits to Great Britain (GB) in 2024 were made by residents of the United States (5.5 million visits), followed by residents of France (3.5 million visits) and Germany (3.2 million visits).

• Spain was estimated to be the most visited country by residents of GB in 2024 (18.2 million visits), followed by France (9.1 million visits) and Italy (4.9 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; there may be differences between these two halves and this affects how the estimates can be used.

• Estimates are published as official statistics in development, as we continue to establish methods to produce estimates from our new data collection design, and to investigate and resolve issues that have arisen from them; estimates can provide general insights into overseas travel and tourism in 2024, but users should refer to 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 provisional and 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.

This article is accompanied by our Improving our travel and tourism statistics: September 2026 update article, which outlines the methodological and quality assurance work completed since our last update. It also sets out our planned next steps to develop and refine our travel and tourism statistics.

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.