United Kingdom · International Tourist Arrivals

## What this measures

International arrivals in United Kingdom in a year: visitors whose usual home is in another country. Yearly, dated December 31.

## Why it matters

Arrivals are the volume behind tourism revenue: hotel, airline and retail demand, service exports and jobs in travel-dependent economies.

## How to read it

Number of arrivals, not people: someone who visits twice counts twice. Compare a country with its own past; cross-country comparisons need care, because countries count differently. The series runs from 1995 to 2020. The World Bank publishes no year after 2020 (checked against its October 2026 update), so the series shows the fall in travel in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, but not the recovery.

## What it does not say

The World Bank's note for United Kingdom: "Includes overnight visitors (tourists) and same-day visitors (excursionists). Arrivals of non-resident visitors at national borders. Data collection by the International Passenger Survey (IPS) was suspended 16 March 2020, for the period April to December 2020 the figures are based on administrative sources and modelling; estimates prior to April 2020 are based on data collected from the International Passenger Survey." Some countries count every visitor at the border, including same-day visitors; others count only overnight tourists, or only guests in hotels and other accommodation. Methods change over time, which can break a series.

## Source

UN Tourism (Yearbook of Tourism Statistics, Compendium of Tourism Statistics and data files) via World Bank World Development Indicators, indicator `ST.INT.ARVL`. Licence per the World Bank's indicator metadata: CC BY 4.0. Attribution: World Bank WDI (CC BY 4.0), compiled from UN Tourism data. Palanor reads it each month (/api/cron/worldbank-sync) and rewrites the history.