Visitors from the UK

Our UK market represents a significant proportion of the visitors Scotland welcomes each year. Understanding more about who they are, how they behave and the preferences they have for their visits can offer a real advantage to those in the tourism industry.

We’re closely monitoring the Coronavirus (COVID-19) situation as it develops and are currently publishing the COVID-19 consumer tracking report which looks at UK holiday intentions as the COVID-19 restrictions are lifted, as well as regular updates on the UK market during the COVID-19 crisis.

In this section:

• Our interactive dashboard
• Annual domestic tourism statistics
• Domestic trip profile
• UK Segmentation

Great Britain is Scotland’s largest tourism source market and you can learn more from the summaries and detailed reports covering the most recent domestic tourism statistics. Information is sourced mainly from the Great Britain Tourism Survey (GBTS) and the Great Britain Day Visits Survey (GBDVS) which provide volumes, values and characteristics of domestic overnight and day trips undertaken by Great Britain residents.

Due to ongoing Covid-19 related travel restrictions meaning data collection has had to be suspended and a planned update to the survey methodology during 2020, a temporary gap in the reporting of the domestic tourism monitors has resulted.  This disruption means the National Tourist Boards will be unable to publish detailed results from the GB Tourism Study (GBTS) and Day Visitor Study (GBDVS) for 2020 or Q1 2021 and any data from this period will only be published after a thorough review to ensure they meet necessary quality standards.  We shall resume fieldwork as soon as domestic travel guidelines ease and anticipate being in a position to commence the delivery of Q2 2021 summary data at some stage during Q3 2021 (barring any unforeseen circumstances).

Explore these short reports that provide bite-size insight into trends in domestic overnight tourism and day trips.

The reports look at the travelling behaviour of visitors in different “life stages” and display  3-year average data to present a more ‘typical’ picture of visits, rather than the most recently available annual information.

VisitScotland use a segmentation model to understand and target UK consumers and to inform our UK marketing strategies and activities which can be seen below.  However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been clear that the factors that previously identified key segments for Scottish tourism are being affected by the current crisis.  As a temporary measure some COVID-19 segments have been developed.  These can be seen on our coronavirus insights UK and Ireland markets page.