Overseas travel and tourism, provisional: April to June 2024

• Overseas residents made an estimated 10.8 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.9 billion in Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2024.
• Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 25.3 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £13.0 billion in Quarter 2 2024.
• Northern Ireland travel and tourism data are not included in the estimates for this quarter; they 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.

Change from UK to Great Britain in quarterly publications

Previously, we have published estimates of:

• overseas residents visiting the UK
• UK residents visiting abroad

Quarterly estimates from Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 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.

Quarterly estimates should return to a UK basis in the future, as our methods and data sources develop. We will keep our users informed of this progress.

Accuracy of the International Passenger Survey estimates

Our latest quarterly datasets contain estimates from Quarter 1 2019 to Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2024, as well as annual estimates for 2019 to 2023.

Estimates for the whole of 2020 must be treated with caution since no data were collected for Quarter 2 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 International Passenger Survey (IPS) trend data.

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

The accuracy of the headline estimates for the latest period is expressed in terms of confidence intervals. More information on confidence levels, and how we measure and communicate uncertainty is available.

Collection of overseas travel and tourism data

The main data source for the Quarter 2 2024 estimates is IPS data.

Survey interviews were carried out at air and seaports, 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, except Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and New Year's Day.

Change to data collection from 1 July 2024

From 1 July 2024, we moved away from the IPS as our main source of overseas travel and tourism data. We now use 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. We plan to publish these estimates in early 2025. Further details on these changes are available in our Improving our travel and tourism statistics; July 2024 article.