What do the final data for 2019 tell us about a Post-Pandemic British Travel Market? If we have learned anything about the UK traveler from the past two decades, it is that UK travelers are resilient and, yes, stubbornly determined, to enjoy their holidays. Taking a look at the latest Market Profile for the UK recently released by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO), one can see that—prior to the coronavirus-driven global pandemic—outbound travel from the UK to the USA market had been on a steady decade-long path of recovery through: the Great Recession that lasted through June 2009; a mid-decade decline in the value of the British pound sterling against the U.S. dollar; and the June 23, 2016 vote of the British to exit (“Brexit”) the European Union.
And now, with inbound international arrivals figures for the first quarter of 2020 showing the sharpest year-on-year decline ever, scattered surveys tell us that some Brits would still like to take a holiday sometime this year—even as UK tour operators and receptive tour operators in the United States who sell to the UK market seem to have forsaken 2020 for 2021 because of the global pandemic.
NTTO’s Market Profile for the UK has a treasure lode of data that tell us where Brits like to visit, where they arrive in the U.S. and their reasons for coming to America: almost nine of every 10 UK travelers come to the USA in order to vacation or to visit friends and relatives (VFR). Below, INBOUND has highlighted some of the key numbers from the NTTO Market Profile. For more information, visit https://travel.trade.gov/.
Multiple responses, % of profiled inbound
Multiple responses, % of profiled inbound
Notes:
Traveler volume is based on the I-94 arrival and departure record, in either electronic or paper format, issued by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Officer to a foreign visitor entering the United States. The I-94 record is the only source for overseas (air, land, and sea) and Mexico-Air non-resident arrivals to the United States.
Traveler profile characteristics are based on the Survey of International Air Travelers (SIAT), a primary research program that provides visitor travel, trip and demographic characteristics.
Only country and world region destinations having a sample size consistently of 100 or more are displayed. Visitation incidence was rounded to two decimal places in NTTO source files beginning in 2014 to reduce artificial ‘jumpiness’ in the data caused by rounding to only one decimal places, especially for destinations having incidence of less than two percentage points. Due to quarterly data weighting by country and port of entry, some unreported destinations may have a higher proportion of total than those reported.
