The number of overseas tourist visits to London, United Kingdom continued to grow in 2024, following a sharp drop in 2021 as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Despite this increase, inbound arrivals in the UK's capital remained below pre-pandemic levels, totaling ***** million in 2024. In the same year, inbound tourist visits to the UK totaled nearly ** million. London leading the way in Europe London’s contribution to inbound tourism in the United Kingdom is significant, with the UK’s capital accounting for around ** percent of international tourist arrivals in the country in 2024. This was more than other leading European destinations, such as Amsterdam, Paris, and Berlin. Those visiting the UK capital also made a significant contribution to the local economy, with expenditure of international visitors in London peaking in 2024, with inbound tourists spending over ** billion British pounds that year. However, this was not reflected in business travel spending in the city, which remained below the figure recorded in 2019. London’s visitor attractions As the largest city in the UK, London is home to some of the country's most iconic visitor attractions. These range from government-sponsored museums, such as the British Museum, to the Tower of London and the ZSL London Zoo. In 2024, the ************** was the most visited tourist attraction in London. Meanwhile, the Natural History Museum ranked second.

In 2024, the number of overseas resident visits to the United Kingdom totaled 39 million, representing a growth of around three percent from the previous year. Has the UK’s tourism industry completely recovered from the coronavirus pandemic? Like in most countries, the travel restrictions put in place to stem the spread of the coronavirus wreaked havoc on the UK’s tourism industry. Overseas visitor numbers dropped to 7.1 million in 2021, representing a drop of over 80 percent from 2019. While the figure reported for 2024 showed a continued recovery in terms of overseas visitors to the UK, it remained below pre-pandemic levels. However, in terms of spending among the UK’s leading inbound travel markets, overseas visitors spent more in 2024 than in 2019, with visitors from the UK’s leading inbound travel market, the United States, spending around 70 percent more during their travels than in 2019. What are the most visited cities in the UK? Unsurprisingly, London has consistently ranked as the most visited town or city in the UK among international tourists in recent years, drawing in over 20 million visitors in 2024. This was around tenfold the number of the second-most visited city, Edinburgh, during the same year. As the UK’s capital city, London’s tourist attractions are as varied as the city itself; however, one particularly strong draw for inbound visitors is Royal Family-related tourism. This is evident with the top two most visited paid tourist attractions in England being based in London and either belonging to the Royal Family or being run by a Royal-affiliated charity. Meanwhile, among UK residents, London ranks as the second most popular destination for a summer staycation, with the South West ranking first.

This dataset contains the London subset of the Tourpedia dataset, specifically focusing on points of interest (POIs) categorized as attractions (dataset available at http://tour-pedia.org/download/london-attraction.csv). The original dataset comprises 20,727 entries that encompass a variety of attractions across London, providing details on several attributes for each POI. These attributes include a unique identifier, POI name, category, location information (address), latitude, longitude, specific details, and user-generated reviews. The review fields contain textual feedback from users, aggregated from platforms such as Google Places, Foursquare, and Facebook, offering a qualitative insight into each location.

However, due to the initial dataset's high proportion of incomplete or inconsistently structured entries, a rigorous cleaning process was implemented. This process entailed the removal of erroneous and incomplete data points, ultimately refining the dataset to 2,341 entries that meet criteria for quality and structural coherence. These selected entries were subjected to further validation to ensure data integrity, enabling a more accurate representation of London's attractions.

• London.csv It contains columns including a unique identifier, POI name, category, location information (address), latitude, longitude, specific details, and user-generated reviews. Those reviews have been previously retrieved and pre-processed from Google Places, Foursquare, and Facebook, and have different formats: all words, only nouns, nouns + verbs, noun + adjectives and nouns + verbs + adjectives.

• London_annotated.csv It contains the ground truth relating to the previous dataset, with manual annotations made by humans on the categorisation of each of the POIs into 12 different pre-defined categories. It has the following columns:

  • POI name
  • POI's address
  • One column for each of the above categories. 1 means that the POI belongs to the category while blank indicates that it does not.

Visit Britain publish data relating to international visitors to the UK. They produce the data in two formats - individual spreadsheets for each region that are updated annually, and a single spreadsheet for all regions, containing less detail but updated quarterly.

Data shows London totals for nights, visits, and spend. Data broken down by age, purpose, duration, mode and country. This data is also available from Visit Britain website, including the latest quarterly data for other regions.

All data taken from the International Passenger Survey (IPS).

Some additional data on domestic tourism can be found on the Visit Britain website, and Visit England both overnight tourism and Day visits pages.

Data on accomodation occupancy levels is also available from Visit England.

An overview of all tourism data for London can be found in this GLAE report 'Tourism in London'

Further information can be found on the London and Partners website.

Comparisons of international tourist arrivals with other world cities are produced by Euromonitor and in Mastercard's Global Destination Cities Index of 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015.

This dataset is included in the Greater London Authority's Night Time Observatory. Click here to find out more.

The combined number of inbound and domestic tourist visits to London, United Kingdom, totaled ***** million in 2024. While this was a slight decrease from the previous year, it was the second-highest number of visits for the UK's capital since 2011.

Inbound visits to London, United Kingdom, grew back in 2022, following a sharp drop due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. In 2022, trips for holiday purposes accounted for the highest number of overseas tourist visits to London. Vacation visits in the UK's capital, however, remained below pre-pandemic levels, totaling just above ***** million in 2022.

GLA Economics is providing on an occasional basis medium-term forecasts of tourism visitor nights in London for domestic and international tourists. The forecasts are on a quarterly basis to 2026 and an annual basis to 2032. The estimates tri-angulate data from a number of sources. The methodology note provides more information on how this has been done.

The expenditure of international visitors in London, United Kingdom, rose in 2024 over the previous year, reaching ***** billion British pounds. Based on figures reaching back to 2009, this represented an all-time high. Despite this rise in inbound tourism spending, however, the number of overseas tourist visits to London in 2024 remained below the figures recorded between 2016 and 2019.

London Borough level tourism trip estimates (thousands).

The ‘top-down’ nature of the Local Area Tourism Impact (LATI) model (starting with London data) means it is best suited to disaggregate expenditure. However, tourism trips were also disaggregated for comparative purposes using the estimated proportions of spending by overseas, domestic and day visitors in the boroughs. Since the trip estimates are derived from data on trips to London they do not account for trips to different boroughs by visitors whilst in London.

Indicative borough level day visitor/tourist estimates for 2007 were derived from the LDA’s own experimental London level day visitor estimates. As such the borough level day visitor estimates should be treated with caution and the 2007 day visitor estimates are not comparable with those from previous years. They are intended only to give a best estimate of the scale of day visitor tourism in each borough from the currently available data.

Further tourism data for UK regions covering trends in visits, nights, and spend to London by visitors from overseas is available on the Visit Britain website. Analyse data by age, purpose, duration, and quarter.

This dataset is no longer updated.

London’s Tourism Direct GVA (TDGVA) in 2019 is estimated by taking London’s share of the latest ONS regional TDGVA publication (2013) and multiplying it with the latest TDGVA estimate (2017) for the UK. The resulting figure is then multiplied with a ratio of London spend data from VisitBritain’s International Passenger Surveys from 2019 and 2017. This approach assumes 1) that London’s share of UK TDGVA has remained constant from 2013 to 2017 and 2) a constant relation between spend and GVA from 2017 to 2019. The annual VisitBritain forecast for the volume and value of inbound tourism to the UK is issued in December each year. They have however updated this to reflect the impact of COVID-19 on inbound tourism to the UK, as well as an estimate of impact on domestic tourism within England. These were used to estimate London’s tourism spend for 2020. More details on the inbound tourism forecast for 2020 to the UK and domestic tourism with in England for 2020 can be found at Visit Britain.

In June 2024, there were around *** million overseas arrivals in the United Kingdom. This was the highest figure for a month of June since 2019, when it reached over *** million. Based on figures reaching back to January 2018, the month with the highest number of inbound visits came in August 2019, when it totaled **** million.

Local Authority level tourist spend estimates (£ millions). Indicitive borough level day visitor estimates for 2007 were derived from the LDA’s own experimental London level day visitor estimates. As such the borough level day visitor estimates should be treated with caution and the 2007 day visitor estimates are not comparable with those from previous years. They are intended only to give a best estimate of the scale of day visitor tourism in each borough from the currently available data. This dataset is no longer updated.

🇬🇧 영국 English London’s Tourism Direct GVA (TDGVA) in 2019 is estimated by taking London’s share of the latest ONS regional TDGVA publication (2013) and multiplying it with the latest TDGVA estimate (2017) for the UK. The resulting figure is then multiplied with a ratio of London spend data from VisitBritain’s International Passenger Surveys from 2019 and 2017. This approach assumes 1) that London’s share of UK TDGVA has remained constant from 2013 to 2017 and 2) a constant relation between spend and GVA from 2017 to 2019. The annual VisitBritain forecast for the volume and value of inbound tourism to the UK is issued in December each year. They have however updated this to reflect the impact of COVID-19 on inbound tourism to the UK, as well as an estimate of impact on domestic tourism within England. These were used to estimate London’s tourism spend for 2020. More details on the inbound tourism forecast for 2020 to the UK and domestic tourism with in England for 2020 can be found at Visit Britain.

In 2022, the number of inbound visits from China to London amounted to ***** thousand. Although this was considerably less than levels recorded before the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in 2020, it represented an increase from 2021, when the figure stood at **** thousand.

The British Museum was the most visited tourist attraction in London in 2024, welcoming roughly *** million visitors. The Natural History Museum in South Kensington and the Tate Modern followed in the ranking that year, with around *** million and *** million visits, respectively. Overall, while the combined attendance at the leading tourist attractions in London increased in 2024 over the previous year, the number of visits at most of the selected attractions remained below pre-pandemic levels. Museums in the UK The museum industry plays an important role in the United Kingdom’s cultural sector. In 2023, museums and galleries accounted for approximately ***** percent of the cultural sector's employment in the UK. Meanwhile, the number of museum enterprises in the United Kingdom experienced an annual increase in 2024, reaching nearly ***. London's contribution to tourism in the UK London is by far the most visited destination in the United Kingdom by international travelers, accounting for over **** of all international tourist arrivals in the UK in 2023. That year, the UK's capital also ranked as the leading city tourism destination in Europe based on the number of bed nights, ahead of Paris and Istanbul.

The Tower of London was the most popular paid attraction in London in 2024, welcoming roughly 2.9 million visitors. That year, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Gardens followed in the ranking, with around 2.3 million visitors. What are the most popular free tourist attractions in London? In 2024, the British Museum topped the ranking of the most visited free attractions in London, welcoming nearly six million visitors. The Natural History Museum and Tate Modern followed on the list that year. In 2024, eight of the 10 most visited tourist attractions in London did not charge for admission tickets. How many tourists visit London every year? London plays a key role in supporting the travel and tourism sector in the United Kingdom. Both before and after the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was by far the city with the highest inbound tourism spending in the UK. In 2023, the number of international tourist visits to London surpassed 20 million, nearly catching up with the overseas tourist visits recorded in 2019.

The British Museum was the most visited free tourist attraction in London in 2024, welcoming roughly 6.5 million visitors. That year, the National History Museum and the Tate Modern followed in the ranking, with around 5.9 million and 4.6 million visitors, respectively. Has tourism in London recovered from the impact of COVID-19? In 2023, the number of overseas visits to London exceeded 20 million. While inbound tourist visits experienced a sharp annual increase, they did not fully recover yet from the impact of COVID-19. That said, expenditure by international visitors in the UK’s capital had more than recovered in 2023, reaching an all-time high that year. London’s contribution to inbound tourism in the UK Both before and after the pandemic, London was by far the most visited city in the UK by international tourists. When looking at the contribution to inbound tourism of leading European travel destinations, the city’s prominent role in supporting inbound tourism in the UK stands out. In 2023, London alone accounted for over half of inbound tourist arrivals in the country.

This horizontal bar chart displays visitors (people) by museum using the aggregation sum in London. The data is about museums.

During the pandemic, the loss of expenditure in London’s Central Activities Zone (CAZ) due to both workers staying at home and tourists being unable or choosing not to visit has had a major impact on the retail, leisure and hospitality sectors.

This analysis seeks to investigate the relative importance of these two cohorts to the CAZ. We estimate local expenditure from commuters to the CAZ in 2020, in a scenario with and without Covid-19. We compare this difference to the anticipated drop in inbound and domestic tourist expenditure in 2020, which we estimate by adjusting forecasts for London produced by Visit Britain.

We estimate a £10.9bn loss in tourism expenditure in the CAZ (£3.5bn domestic and £7.4bn inbound) compared to a £1.9bn loss in expenditure from commuters to the CAZ (£1.4bn of this expenditure is from commuters from London and £0.5bn is from commuters outside of London).