Introduction

VisitScotland carries out continual and comprehensive research to better understand our international markets and keep up to date on trends and developments.  This includes investigation of markets and consumer segments, evaluation of campaigns, and monitoring of market news, industry trends and competitor activities.  The results feed into both marketing strategy and campaign planning.

International markets are important to Scottish tourism.  Because foreign visitors tend to stay longer than domestic visitors, their total expenditure per visit is higher – 17% of the total number of trips made to Scotland in 2007 were by foreign visitors but this share provided around 35% of total expenditure.

Core markets

Our market priorities are based on a thorough comparative analysis of countries in terms of their outbound travel behaviour, holiday preferences, volume and value of visits to Scotland and direct access capacity.

The table below provides a summary of the statistics for visitors to Scotland from the main international markets.  Click on the country names to get more information on each.

List of top 10 international markets with links to pages

*Republic of Ireland is looked after by VisitScotland’s UK and Ireland Marketing team and more information can be found in that section.

Source: The International Passenger Survey issued by UK National Statistics

For information on our International Marketing strategy and campaigns click here

Emerging markets

As well as the current core markets, VisitScotland also focuses on a number of emerging markets.  These are countries whose level of outbound travel and / or visitation to Scotland does not currently match the main markets, but which offer considerable future potential.  Again, please click on the country names to get more information on each.

The following table presents the latest statistics available from the IPS. Please note that because they are based on interviews with relatively low numbers of visitors, these statistics are very much estimates and can fluctuate considerably from year to year.

Please click on the country names in the following table to get more information on each market.

**Scotland also receives 12,000 visitors from Hong Kong, staying 123,000 nights and spending £9m

Source: The International Passenger Survey issued by UK National Statistics

For information on our International Marketing strategy and campaigns click here

Worldwide tourism trends

Tourism worldwide is fast-moving and ever-evolving, and we continually monitor developments, so as to identify the key trends and future new markets.  

Useful sources for monitoring tourism trends include the following:

Sources of information particularly useful for each market are listed in the market pages.