Overseas travel and tourism, provisional: July to September and October to December 2024

• Overseas residents made an estimated 10.4 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £10.2 billion in Quarter 3 (July to Sept) 2024.

• Overseas residents made an estimated 9.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.4 billion in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2024.

• Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 29.0 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £28.4 billion in Quarter 3 2024.

• Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 20.3 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £17.3 billion in Quarter 4 2024.

• These estimates are published as official statistics in development, reflecting ongoing data collection changes and methodological developments to transform our travel and tourism statistics; more information on these changes is available in our Improving our travel and tourism statistics: June 2025 update article.

• Northern Ireland travel and tourism data are not included in the estimates for these quarters; they will be included in our annual estimates for 2024, which we aim to publish in late July to early August 2025.

Developing our travel and tourism statistics

These provisional estimates are labelled as official statistics in development to reflect the ongoing development of our travel and tourism statistics. Our Improving our travel and tourism statistics article series provides further information on the data collection changes and methodological developments we are undertaking. Once these developments are complete, we will decide whether the statistics are of sufficient quality and value to be published as “official statistics”, or if further development is needed.

This bulletin is accompanied by our Improving our travel and tourism statistics: June 2025 update, which outlines the methodological and quality assurance work completed since our last update in February 2025. It also sets out our planned next steps to develop and refine our travel and tourism statistics.

While quality assuring our developing methods, we identified several data quality issues, which remain in the Quarter 3 (July to Sept) and Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2024 estimates published in this bulletin.

The majority of these issues have a very small impact on estimates and will be resolved for the Travel trends 2024 annual release onwards. These include:

• overestimating Great Britain (GB) residents' visits abroad by less than 0.1% in Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2024 because of incorrectly assigning a Northern Ireland postcode to GB

• underestimating fares (by less than 2%) and spend (by less than 0.2%) in Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2024 because of incorrectly grouping total fares and spend across variables

• overestimating GB residents' visits abroad in Quarter 4 2024 because of incorrectly including a small number of respondents travelling for non-tourist reasons; this accounted for less than 0.01% of GB residents' visits abroad

Of the remaining issues, incorrect airport codes were assigned for 7% to 7.5% of Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2024 data, meaning some country-level estimates may be underestimated or overestimated. This will be resolved for Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2025 onwards.

Some GB residents’ overseas pre-departure accommodation spend has been reported as post-departure accommodation spend. We have removed all post-departure accommodation spend from the Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2024 data while we investigate and identify a solution to this issue. Therefore, it is likely that GB residents’ overseas spend estimates are underestimated in these data. 

We have also identified some patterns in our Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2024 estimates using our new methodology that differ from previous quarters’ estimates for Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2023. Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2024 estimates attribute a lower proportion of visits via sea transport to overseas residents than previous years’ quarters. We will conduct further investigation into the survey design and the administrative data used for calibration to better understand this difference. This will form part of our ongoing development and quality assurance of our new methods as we continue to publish as official statistics in development. 

We are sharing our developing estimates as official statistics in development to support the release of timely and relevant statistics while we continue to resolve minor issues such as these. We are confident the developing estimates published in this bulletin are relevant and useful for our users.

Further details on these data quality issues are available in Section 4: Data considerations for Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2024 estimates in our Improving our travel and tourism statistics: June 2025 update.

Uncertainty measures of travel and tourism estimates

95% confidence intervals are provided for the headline travel and tourism estimates provided in this bulletin. These intervals mean that if we drew 100 random samples and calculated a 95% confidence interval for each sample, we would expect 95 of them to contain the true population value. A wider interval indicates more uncertainty in the estimate. The confidence intervals for data used in this bulletin can be found in the accompanying datasets (Section 2: Data on overseas travel and tourism).

More information on how we measure uncertainty is available on our uncertainty and how we measure it for our surveys page.

In the datasets published in this release, we have not provided the confidence intervals that would normally accompany our regional estimates of overseas residents visiting GB, spend estimates of GB residents visiting abroad, and estimates of GB residents for the "Fly / Cruise stay on board" category for this Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2024 release.

This is because further methods development to produce these confidence intervals is required. Users should take caution when interpreting these estimates, as the level of uncertainty around these is unknown.

Users should take similar caution when interpreting other quarterly estimates where confidence intervals are not currently provided as standard.

Change from UK to GB geography

Quarterly estimates from Quarter 1 2024 cover:

• overseas residents visiting GB
• GB residents visiting places outside the UK

Quarterly estimates prior to Quarter 1 2024 covered:

• overseas residents visiting the UK
• UK residents visiting places outside the UK

We plan to include estimates for overseas residents visiting the UK, and UK residents visiting places outside the UK in our annual Travel trends 2024 publication, which we aim to publish in late July to early August 2025.

You can read more about this change and the reasons behind it in our Improving our travel and tourism statistics article series.