Tourism is one of England’s largest, most valuable industries, supporting 200,000+ businesses, employing about 2.6 million people and, in 2023, generating £70.2 billion in domestic visitor spending. The Visit England report presents the findings of the Survey of Visits to Visitor Attractions in England, providing an England-wide analysis of trends plus visits data.

Overall visits to attractions in England continued to increase and were up 11% in 2023 compared to 2022 with the rate of growth slower than in the previous two years and with numbers down 28% on 2019. The survey, which gathered information from 1,513 English attractions, shows that growth was fuelled by the return of overseas visitors and an increase in school trips in 2023. International visits to England’s attractions were up 80% last year compared to 2022. Domestic visits to attractions in 2023 meanwhile saw a decrease of 2% on the previous year.

Most regions saw admissions grow between 4-8% with London the exception seeing growth of 26% largely driven by international visitors. Despite the high percentage increase the volume of attraction visits in London remains well below 2019 levels, at -22%.

Where admissions declined between 2022 and 2023 attractions provided a variety of reasons to explain this. The key market drivers were: (1) Cost of living crisis, affecting consumer day trips (2) Decline in staycations (3) Wet weather (affecting outdoor attractions). Attraction specific drivers were primarily associated with: (1) Planned closure (e.g. for refurbishment), (2) Less successful programming in 2023/blockbuster in 2022 and (3) Staffing issues.

The Tower of London retained the top spot last year as the most visited ‘paid for’ attraction in England, with 2.8 million visitors, up 38% on 2022, although down 6% on 2019. Kew Gardens also retained second place with 2.0 million visitors, up 1% on 2022 and Chester Zoo came in third with 1.9 million, up 6% on 2022.

The British Museum also regained poll position in the list of ‘free attractions’ in England in 2023, with 5.8 million visitors, up 42% on 2022 although still down 7% on 2019. Second was the Natural History Museum with 5.7 million visitors, up 18% on 2022. The third most visited free attraction in England in 2023 was the Tate Modern with 4.7 million visitors, up 22% on 2022.

The highest levels of growth were seen in the ‘Museum/Art Galleries’ category, which suffered one of the sharpest declines in visitors because of COVID-19, with a 20% increase in visits in 2023 compared to 2022. ‘Places of Worship’ saw the second largest increase, up 19% on the previous year, and ‘Visitor/Heritage Centres’ showed recovery in visitor numbers last year, up 14% on 2022. ‘Historic Houses/Castles’ also saw good growth with a 13% increase in 2023 on the previous year.

Country parks, gardens and leisure/ theme park admissions remained fairly consistent with last year, with these outdoor categories adversely affected by the wetter weather in 2023.

Additional survey headlines

Marketing – Marketing expenditure increased again in 2023, with 31% of attractions reporting an increase compared to their marketing budgets in 2022. This shift was evident across all attraction-sizes but was less marked at smaller sites, with less than 20,000 visits a year. Marketing budgets grew across all regions. This was most evident in London, where 47% of sites reported an increase. Use of social media continues to grow, with 95% of visitor attractions using any social media or apps in 2023.
Employment – Levels at nearly a quarter of attractions remain below pre-pandemic levels. This is most typically due to budgetary limitations, but also because many sites are struggling to attract the right candidates for paid roles or volunteers and some have restructured their operations to reduce the number of staff needed. 58% of attractions have been affected by rising wages – a challenge that increases with attraction size (and staffing levels). However, staffing levels did increase across all types of staff for all sizes of attraction in 2023.
Environment – 61% of attractions have said that they have an environmental strategy in place. Over a quarter of attractions (27%) invested in energy saving/carbon reduction during 2023, but this rose to 63% of large attractions (with over 200k admissions).
Tourism – Inbound visits in 2023 remained below 2019 levels but the number of nights stayed equalled 2019 levels and there were significant improvements compared with 2022. The number of visits in 2023 was 7% down on pre-pandemic levels, but was 21% above 2022, while the volume of international visitor nights was higher than both 2019 and 2022. According to the International Passenger Survey, the UK welcomed 38 million visits in total during 2023, with visit volume strengthening throughout the year except for a decline in Q4. Visitor spend was higher in 2023 than in 2022 and 2019, but in real terms fell by 10% compared with 2019 when inflation is taken into account. The top inbound market for visits and spend was the USA, which surpassed pre-pandemic visit levels by 14%. Other key markets were France, Germany, the Irish Republic and Spain, but these all remained below 2019 visit levels. In total, visits from Europe accounted for 65% of total inbound visits to the UK.
Energy costs – Two thirds of attractions have been affected by rising energy costs, rising to 79% amongst charging sites, and 80% amongst sites with admissions above 100k per annum. Sites are finding it increasingly difficult to absorb these costs, with 26% increasing costs to visitors as a result of higher energy rates in 2023, compared with 18% the year before. Charging sites are much more likely to pass costs onto visitors than free sites (with 51% vs. 16% doing so respectively).