Tourism is one of England’s largest, most valuable industries, supporting hundreds of thousands of small-to-medium sized businesses, over two million jobs and generating about £127 billion annually for the economy.

In the West of England region, the value of the visitor economy is around £2.7bn and expected to exceed £3bn within the next few years, with the growth in infrastructure, experiences and accommodation.

So, what is the Visitor Economy?

It encompasses all the economic activity generated by people visiting a place for various purposes, including tourism, business, and leisure. It's not just about tourism, but also the infrastructure, services, and businesses that support those visits. The biggest recipients of visitor spend are food and drink establishments and retail, so our high streets.  The value and importance of visitors should never be overlooked and there are levers that government has that could substantially drive visitation from overseas and support our resident population to enjoy breaks in the UK.

In order to develop a robust and sustainable visitor economy in our region, we need a strong mix of both domestic and international visitors. The way that people research, plan and book their travel is changing, and so the work of Visit West is more important than ever to ensure that our destinations and businesses remain connected to and engaged with these ways of working, from distribution partners to media coverage.

There is a phenomenal amount of work and investment that goes into engaging with and supporting these business-to-business networks, across both the leisure travel trade and business events industry in particular.  This involves sales missions, media hosting, online seminars and trade engagement year-round to support business to develop and create new experiences that are aligned with current and future visitor trends.  There are different wants and needs from different audiences, and certain cultural expectations, and this information needs to be shared with our business community – again why we run so many seminars, and events for the industry, and deliver a comprehensive membership programme to enable businesses to access these opportunities.

In January and February alone, more than 100 media articles promoting the region were published as a result of the work of the Visit West team, and our consumer websites reached more than 1.1m session starts already.  In addition, we have hosted more than 100 travel buyers in the region, attended 6 trade events in the UK and overseas and confirmed more than £50,000 of events.

The theme this year is ‘Local Stories, National Growth’ and nowhere is this more evident than in the work of our local tour guides.  One in particular, Sheila Hannon, creative producer of Show of Strength’s Theatre Tours, has been shortlisted for Visit England’s Tourism Superstar for 2026.  Find out what makes Sheila’s tours so special and vote for her here.