1. Main points
Overseas residents made an estimated 10.3 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £9.5 billion in Quarter 3 (July to Sept) 2024.
Overseas residents made an estimated 9.4 million visits to Great Britain and spent an estimated £7.1 billion in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2024.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 28.8 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £28.3 billion in Quarter 3 2024.
Residents of Great Britain made an estimated 20.4 million visits outside of the UK and spent an estimated £17.4 billion in Quarter 4 2024.
Annual 2024 estimates consist of Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) and Quarter 2 (Apr to June) 2024 data collected and produced under our previous International Passenger Survey (IPS) design, and Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2024 data collected and produced under our new design; there may be differences between these two halves and this affects how the estimates can be used.
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: September 2026 update.
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.
These are official statistics in development. We are continuing to develop and quality assure the new methods. Estimates are subject to future change as we introduce further improvements to these methods. More information can be found in Section 3: Data sources and quality.
2. Data on overseas travel and tourism
Estimates of overseas residents' visits and spending
Dataset | Released 13 June 2025
Quarterly estimates of overseas residents' visits and spending. Also includes data on nights, purpose, region of UK visited and mode of travel. Breakdowns by nationality and area of residence are covered.
Estimates of visits and spending abroad
Dataset | Released 13 June 2025
Quarterly estimates of visits and spending abroad. Also includes data on nights, purpose, country visited and mode of travel.
3. Data sources and quality
Developing our travel and tourism statistics
These estimates are provisional and 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: September 2026 update article, which outlines the methodological and quality assurance work completed since our last update. It also sets out our planned next steps to develop and refine our travel and tourism statistics.
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.
Back to table of contents5. Cite this statistical bulletin
Office for National Statistics (ONS), released 13 June 2025, ONS website, statistical bulletin, Overseas travel and tourism, provisional: July to September and October to December 2024