Visit Scotland | Alba

Overview

  • Famed for its traditional music and hospitable people, the Highlands is made up of spectacular mountains and dramatic glens which create some truly stunning walking, cycling or driving routes. The raw wilderness of the Highlands is truly the Scotland of your imagination.
  • Statistics on the volume and value of visitors to individual regions of Scotland are collated from several national surveys. These include the International Passenger Survey, the Great Britain Tourism Survey and the Great Britain Day Visits Survey.
  • These national surveys were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated travel restrictions. Prior to the pandemic, three year average figures were produced for individual regions due to some having lower sample sizes on an annual basis.
  • We are currently reviewing the full year 2022 data to establish what is feasible at a regional level. It may be that some regions will require to be amalgamated to produce an indication of regional performance until more data is available.
  • The latest factsheet available is for 2019.

Highland factsheet 2019

Published December 2020

This report provides a summary of statistics on tourism in the Scottish Highlands. It gathers information from a suite of tourism monitors, national statistics and commissioned research.

Download (3Mb)

In this article:

1. Key statistics

2.9 million

overnight visits

9.6 million

day visits

11.5 million

nights

£1.6 billion

total spend

Figures shown represent tourism performance for the Highlands, 2019

2. Scotland Visitor Survey 2023

We are currently conducting a visitor survey across Scotland. We are speaking to overnight visitors on the ground in Scotland and then will follow up on their return home so that we get a full picture of their visitor experience.

We will be carrying out the research during 2023 and results will be available in 2024. It will gather insight on motivations for visiting, experiences in Scotland and how visitors have rated aspects of their trip. Where we have a robust sample size we will look at the data at a regional level.

Previous research was conducted in 2015/2016.

Scotland Visitor Survey 2015 and 2016 - The Highlands summary

Published April 2017

Download (1,007Kb)

Related links

Domestic sentiment tracker 

The latest tracking research on UK residents' holiday intentions. This includes perceptions relating to the cost-of-living crisis, and industry…