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:

• Explore the domestic statistics
• 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.

Alongside our partner organisations, Visit England and Visit Wales, we reviewed the GBTS and GBDVS survey scope and methods in 2019. A number of changes will help future-proof the domestic tourism monitoring surveys and provide greater consistency with information for other destinations. 

Data for 2021 domestic overnight trips, will be published in October 2022 and data for 2021 domestic day trips will be published in December 2022.

Further detail can be found in our Update on Great Britain domestic travel statistics.

Domestic Trip Profile

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.