Visitor attractions received a quarter more visitors in 2021, but the numbers are still below pre-pandemic levels.
The Association of Major Visitor Attractions (Alva) said there was strong demand for gardens, parks, forests and zoos in the UK.
But while visitor numbers increased 25% in 2020, overall it is still 57% lower than it was in 2019, before the Covid outbreak.
However, those figures are not comparable, because the attractions were not open for several months last year.
For the first time, the most visited attraction was not in London. Windsor Great Park, which received 5.4 million visitors, while the second most visited attraction was Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which saw a 61% increase to 1.9 million.
Other popular attractions included Chester Zoo, the Natural History Museum, the British Museum, Tate Modern, Somerset House, the Science Museum, RHS Garden Wisley, and Forestry England’s Jeskyns Community Woodland in Kent.
The average number of days sites were closed in 2021 when they normally would have been open was 99, equal to 31% of regular open days.
All visitor attractions were closed in the first few months of 2021 during the lockdown, but most restrictions were lifted in the summer. Even after that, some indoor attractions continued to open at reduced capacity and with reduced opening hours.
Alva said the total number of visits in 2021 was 67.8 million, but that’s less than half the 156.6 million visits in 2019, when attractions were open for the entire calendar year.
Sites that are primarily outdoors saw a less steep drop than their indoor counterparts. This is likely to be the result of lifting restrictions on outdoor socializing earlier in the year.
Gardens are almost back to pre-pandemic levels, Alva said, while zoos remained 20% below.
But there was a much more significant drop for mixed sites like heritage and cathedrals, which are down 51%, and mainly closed places like museums and galleries, which are down 73% on pre-pandemic levels.
On average, sites that provided an international figure reported that only 4% of visits in the last year were made by visitors from abroad, as a result of strict travel restrictions.
Bernard Donoghue, director of Alva, commented: “These figures, in a single year, show that tourism was the first and the most affected by the consequences of Covid.
“There is a wide spectrum of those attractions, mostly outdoors, that are recovering well, but still many, mostly those that generally rely heavily on foreign visitors, are still surviving.”
He added: “Foreign visitors to the UK are not likely to return to pre-pandemic levels until 2024/2025, so for many of our most iconic attractions this means not returning to financial resilience for four or five years afterward. having closed its doors for the first time”.
To improve the number of foreign visitors, Donoghue suggested the government could reverse its decision that school and youth groups from the EU need passports instead of identity documents to travel to the UK, a measure that came into force in October.
1. Windsor Great Park – 5.4 million
2. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew – 1.9 million
3. Chester Zoo – 1.6 million
4. Natural History Museum – 1.5 million
5. RHS Garden Wisley – 1.4 million
6. British Museum – 1.3 million
7. Tate Modern with – 1.1 million
8. Somerset House – 984,000
9. Science Museum – 955,000
10. Jeskyns Community Forest – 878,000
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