The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic caused serious disruptions to the travel industry worldwide. When surveyed in March 2021, respondents from the United Kingdom declared that having received a vaccine was the most important factor when deciding whether to go on a vacation, with ** percent stating that this was the case.

Travel was brought to a standstill by COVID-19, threatening the UK economy. With restrictions now lifted, let's review some emerging trends in the UK tourism industry.

There were around ******* trips from Denmark to the United Kingdom in 2024, an increase over the previous year. In 2022, the number of visits rose dramatically from ****** in 2021, a year that had been heavily impacted by the travel restrictions imposed during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

The 2021 travel to work matrix estimated from our aggregate spatial modelling with assumed pre-coronavirus (COVID-19) commuting travel behaviours. The data use the Middle Layer Super Output Area 2011 boundaries covering England and Wales. The first column is origin (where people live) and the first row is destination (where people work). Corresponding values show the number of commuters travelling between origin and destination. These are experimental data and should not be used to make decisions.

Ipsos UK conducted a series of six waves of UK-wide online surveys through the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic on behalf of the Department for Transport as part of the All Change? research programme. The research programme was designed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to measure and explore the reasons for current and intended changes in travel behaviour amongst the British public.

Fieldwork for the first wave took place in May/June 2020 while the sixth and final wave took place in November 2021. All survey interviews were conducted online withadults aged 16-75 years old across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The data are longitudinal; however, they include additional fresh samples at each wave. The data are provided here in a single dataset file covering all six waves.

Respondents at waves 2-6 were drawn from those that had taken part in previous waves and agreed to be recontacted. While wave 2 involved 'top-up' sampling to boost the overall sample to approximately 4,000, this was not the case at wave 3 when the sample was drawn exclusively from the longitudinal cohort and contained no 'fresh' samples. At wave 4, a targeted 'top-up' exercise was undertaken to bolster the numbers among a selection of groups and geographies available for recontact at wave 5 (this reached 564 respondents). Waves 5 and 6 also involved a full 'top-up' exercise to secure samples of over 4,000.

At each wave, the survey questionnaire was translated into the Welsh language with respondents in Wales given the choice of whether to complete the survey in Welsh or in English.

Further information and reports are available on the GOV.UK web site.

The Leeds City Council Annual Travel to Work Survey 2020 ran between 15th October and 15th November 2020. The survey was moved from its traditional spring timeframe as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and related lockdowns. As with previous years the survey ran via iTrace utilising the established database of businesses, organisations and schools. To reflect the substantial changes the pandemic has had on businesses across the city, the survey included questions to gauge how mode of travel has changed from Pre-Covid times to current arrangements. The survey also included a series of questions related to car parking. The survey received 8738 responses, made up of 4653 business responses, 2935 Leeds City Council employees and 1411 from schools. The number of responses is substantially lower than previous years. A number of businesses remain closed, and although the survey was launched when a tiered system was in place, a national lockdown was announced on 31st October with all non-essential activities curtailed.

In 2023, there were ******* trips from Norway to the United Kingdom, which marked an increase from the previous year. While visitation rates dropped significantly in 2020 and 2021 due to travel restrictions imposed during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, they had already been declining since 2014, following a peak of ******* trips.

Explore the interactive maps showing the average delay and average speed on the Strategic Road Network and local ‘A’ roads in England, in 2022.

On the Strategic Road Network (SRN) for 2022, the average delay is estimated to be 9.3 seconds per vehicle per mile (spvpm), compared to free flow, a 9.4% increase on 2021 and a 2.1% decrease on 2019.

The average speed is estimated to be 58.1 mph, down 1.4% from 2021 and up 0.2% from 2019.

On local ‘A’ roads for 2022, the average delay was estimated to be 45.5 seconds per vehicle per mile compared to free flow, up 2.5% from 2021 and down 2.8% from 2019 (pre-coronavirus)

The average speed is estimated to be 23.7 mph, down 1.7% from 2021 and up 2.2% from 2019 (pre-coronavirus).

Average speeds in 2022 have stabilised towards similar trends observed before the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

The outbreak of coronavirus (COVID-19) has had a marked impact on everyday life, including on congestion on the road network. As some of these data are affected by the coronavirus pandemic in the UK, caution should be taken when interpreting these statistics and comparing them with other time periods. Additional http://bit.ly/COVID_Congestion_Analysis">analysis on the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on road journeys in 2020 is also available. This Storymap contains charts and interactive maps for road journeys in England in 2020.

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During the second quarter of 2025, visits abroad from the United Kingdom totaled ******million, which was an increase over the previous quarter. However, this figure remained below pre-pandemic levels for the same month. Over the period considered, monthly outbound visits from the UK peaked at around *****million in the third quarter of 2024. Tourism in the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic turned the global tourism industry upside down, with countries worldwide enacting lockdowns and travel bans to limit the spread of the virus. As a result of the emergency measures, the total number of outbound tourist visits from the United Kingdom declined by ** percent in 2020 over the previous year, then dropped even further in 2021, reaching the lowest figure in a decade. Since then, outbound visitation rates not only recovered but reached a record high in 2024, totaling over ** million visits. However, inbound tourist visits in the UK have not recovered at the same rate, with the 2024 figure around five percent lower than in 2019. Contribution of travel and tourism to the economy in the UK In 2024, the total contribution of travel and tourism to GDP in the UK amounted to *** billion British pounds, which was around **** percent higher than before the pandemic. Meanwhile, travel and tourism's total contribution to employment in the UK is significant, with *** million jobs supported by the industry in 2024, which was slightly lower than in 2019.

Total domestic travel spending in Great Britain amounted to over ** billion British pounds in 2024. The largest share of this expenditure came from domestic day trips, which totaled **** billion British pounds; this, however, was nearly ***percent less than the 2019 figure. Conversely, spending on domestic overnight trips in Great Britain was ***percent higher in 2024 than in 2019, standing at *****billion British pounds.

Corporate travel is closely tied to fluctuations in business confidence. Economic uncertainty, Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic, which brought the industry to a halt in March 2020, significantly dented revenue for agencies at the beginning of the previous five-year period in 2020-21. The industry is still adapting to the new working trends and spending strategies of corporate companies post-pandemic in 2025-26. Demand for travel services has also faced recent hurdles of high prices for flights and hotels due to steep inflation and companies’ efforts to curb their carbon emissions. Video calls are now a cemented alternative to domestic and international business travel that saves time and money for companies. Demand from the industry's largest downstream market, the banking, financial services and insurance industries, has dropped due to the relocation of many companies out of the UK to avoid the loss of passporting rights, which they lost back in 2021. Loss of major financial clients has left a lingering impression on demand for corporate travel agents. Although industry revenue is expected to grow by 7.7% in 2025-26 as businesses increase their levels of travel, revenue is anticipated to soar at a compound annual rate of 41.8% to £4.6 billion over the five years through 2025-26 after it plummeted in 2021-22 amid lockdown restrictions. Agencies have faced unsustainably high operational expenses in recent years, driving many out of the industry and constraining profits. Over the five years through 2030-31, revenue is expected to rise at a compound annual rate of 5.1% to reach £5.9 billion, which is slightly above pre-pandemic industry revenue. The industry is significantly affected by business confidence and profit, meaning the pace at which the economy recovers following sluggish economic growth and dented business confidence will likely influence industry revenue heavily over the coming years. The growing use of virtual meetings and events and the ever-growing demand for online travel agents will slow the market's full recovery. However, progress between the UK and EU regarding ease of travel will stand to benefit the corporate travel services industry in the coming years.

In 2022, there were around ** thousand visits from Croatia to the United Kingdom (UK). While this was an increase on the previous year, which had been impacted by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, the 2022 figure was less than half that of 2021 when ** thousand visits were made.

The International Passenger Survey (IPS) aims to collect data on both credits and debits for the travel account of the Balance of Payments, provide detailed visit information on overseas visitors to the United Kingdom (UK) for tourism policy, and collect data on international migration.

International Passenger Survey and COVID-19
The Office for National Statistics notes that International Passenger Survey (IPS) interviewing was suspended on 16 March 2020 because of the coronavirus (COVID-19). It is not certain when it will resume.

Travel and tourism estimates for Quarter 1 (Jan to Mar) 2020 have been published to make the best possible use of the available data. The ONS expect that publishable estimates for March 2020 can be produced using the data collected up to 16 March 2020. The data available from UKDS covers Quarter 1 2020 with four subject areas, termed 'Airmiles', 'Alcohol', 'Qregtown' and 'Qcontact'. These files can be joined together using the variables YEAR, SERIAL, FLOW and QUARTER.

No IPS data will be collected for the period when the survey is not operational, and the usual travel and tourism outputs from the IPS will not be published for this period. However, the IPS team will publish information to help users to understand trends in total international travel, based on the available administrative data from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the Department for Transport (DfT). This will provide figures on numbers of international journeys arriving into and departing from the UK, but there will be no information about the characteristics of these passengers.

Further information can be found on the ONS https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/leisureandtourism/articles/traveltrends/2019">Travel Trends webpage.

Context

COVID-19 The Government Response Stringency Index

The Government Response Stringency Index is a composite measure based on nine response indicators including school closures, workplace closures, and travel bans, rescaled to a value from 0 to 100 (100 = strictest response).

Content

OxCGRT collects publicly available information on indicators of government response. These indicators take policies such as school closures, travel bans, etc. and record them on an ordinal scale; the remainder are financial indicators such as fiscal or monetary measures.

OxCGRT measures the variation in governments’ responses using its 'COVID-19 Government Response Stringency Index (Stringency Index)'. This composite measure is a simple additive score of nine indicators measured on an ordinal scale, rescaled to vary from 0 to 100. Please note that this measure is for comparative purposes only, and should not necessarily be interpreted as a rating of the appropriateness or effectiveness of a country's response.

Acknowledgements

Data published by Thomas Hale, Sam Webster, Anna Petherick, Toby Phillips, and Beatriz Kira (2020). Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker, Blavatnik School of Government. https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/oxford-covid-19-government-response-tracker

Photo by Étienne Godiard on Unsplash

Inspiration

BCG - COVID-19 AI Challenge Improve BCG Data and Provide Insights to "BCG - COVID-19" Clinical Trials

The number of visits from the European Union to the United Kingdom continued to grow in 2024 over the previous year, after shrinking in 2021 due to the impact of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Despite the annual increase, inbound trips from EU member countries to the UK remained below pre-pandemic levels, totaling ***** million in 2024. That year, the number of visits from the UK to the European Union also rose compared to 2023 but did not catch up with pre-pandemic figures.

This file contains daily attendance data for state-funded education settings for dates affected by October half term and Easter break only.Settings on half term or Easter break are excluded from these figures. For this reason, data within this file is not comparable to data within table 1b. Data is in this file has been scaled to account for non-response so it is nationally representative of settings that were not on half term or Easter break.