This is my first in a series of blog posts sharing some of my favourite and most-used data sources for analysing and understanding audiences.
One of the websites I use most frequently in my work analysing audiences is Visit Britain.
Visit Britain is Great Britain’s official tourism board, and is responsible for promoting our country to both domestic (UK) and overseas tourists, and subsequently for collecting information about those tourists and how they behave. This means their website has an absolute wealth of data, insights and reports, which are all invaluable for the cultural, heritage and attraction sectors when it comes to understanding our audiences – whether home or abroad.
Here's a look at some of my favourite resources on the VisitBritain website.
Visit England, Visit Scotland and Visit Wales have collaborated for more than a decade to produce the Great British Day Visits Survey, a survey of 35,000 respondents annually that examines the nature, value and volume of the ‘days out’ market in the UK.
The survey details how UK day trippers prefer to spend their free time, what they do, where they go, and how leisure behaviour differs between different demographics (e.g. age, country, children in household). While the survey fieldwork has been disrupted by COVID-19 (and leisure habits have changed significantly in the interim due to the pandemic), the survey produces a fantastic report about trends in leisure behaviour, as well as a great online data browser for you to create your own custom tables.
If your organisation is targeting domestic day trippers (who are a core audience for many cultural organisations, particularly since COVID has caused overseas tourism to slow), then this survey is an invaluable source of insight into a huge target market.
https://www.visitbritain.org/gb-day-visits-survey-latest-results
The GBTS is a national consumer survey looking at the volume and value of domestic overnight tourism in the UK – what many people call the ‘staycation’ market, that is Britons travelling around Britain. Data collection has again been interrupted by COVID-19 and is due to resume (with some methodological changes) in due course, but the historical data is valuable in showing the total number of trips, nights spent, and expenditure by tourism in various regions and countries across the UK.
This is valuable for the cultural sector in estimating how large the ‘staycation’ market might be in your region when planning your audience development strategy or embarking upon projects like travel trade bookings.
Like the GBDVS, the GBTS has an online data browser which allows you to download custom tables depending on the data you’re trying tofind.
As we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic, intent to travel (both home and abroad) still varies widely between inividuals. Some people feel happy to take day trips and holidays as usual, while others remain hesitant. The Domestic Tourism Sentiment Tracker is a tracking survey of 1,500 adults across the UK, looking at the likelihood of UK residents to travel; when and where they plan to go; specific trip details such as accommodation type and activities undertaken and the type of reassurances they're seeking from the sector.
This is helpful for the cultural and attraction sectors because it looks at intention to visit a range of different leisure venues (such as museums, zoos, heritage centres or theme parks) as well as factors which would increase their confidence, and make them more likely to book in light of COVID-19 (e.g. free cancellation, cleaning measures).
https://www.visitbritain.org/domestic-tourism-sentiment-tracker
If your organisation attracts visitors from overseas, then the International Passenger Survey (run by the Office for National Statistics) is a great data set to help you understand trends in inbound tourism.
It looks at the number of visits into the UK per quarter, as well as the purpose of those visits (e.g. holiday, visiting friends and relatives, business or study), how long they spent in the UK, and how much they spent.
Face-to-face fieldwork for the survey (which is usually conducted in airports, ports etc) was halted in 2020 due to the pandemic, but restarted in 2021 (albeit with a small sample size).
Cultural organisations are able to use this survey to estimate the size of potential target markets for overseas tourists for their region, as well as when and why tourists from different countries are likely to visit the UK throughout the calendar year.
https://www.visitbritain.org/2021-inbound-data
If your organisation attracts a lot of overseas tourists, then you might spot certain nationalities visiting more than others, and may even have a strategy to target those particular visitors.
One of my favourite resources on the Visit Britain website is their market segment reports. These are detailed break downs of forty two key inbound markets, which cover a vast array of information such as the number of visits from each country, when in the year they’re most likely to visit, where in the UK they visit, the activities they enjoy, amount they spend, consumer trends and how they arrive.
They are superbly helpful resources (they have interactive tools, a full profile and shorter snapshot for each country) for cultural organisations to understand the mindset and behaviours of various international visitors from around the world, which can really help when it comes to designing experiences and marketing campaigns that compete for tourists’ time, attention and footfall.
These are just a snapshot of some of the huge number of resources and datasets Visit Britain publish. You can explore more by clicking on one of the three headings in the ‘Corporate’ section of their website.
