How to attract international visitors

let's chat a bit more about international visitors And in general, why do you think they are so important to the visitor economy in Cumbria?

Yeah, so there's lots of benefits to welcoming international visitors.

We know that they typically stay longer when they're here.

For example, our 2025 Cumbria visitor survey showed that international visitors stay 5.92 nights on average compared to 4.18 nights of domestic visitors.

So it's really good to see that our international visitors are staying longer.

We also know that they spend more when they're here as well.

So that could be through experiences, food and drink, tours, transport, that sort of thing.

They generally plan and book their holidays further in advance.

So for businesses, that really helps.

Obviously, we are generally seeing more of a last minute booking trend.

But actually, by working with international markets, those bookings will come in sooner.

So actually for businesses, it helps them to be able to plan and forecast what's going to be coming in.

They do travel off peak as well.

So a really key objective for Cumbria Tourism is to ensure that we're encouraging people to visit all year round, not just in the sort of what we call busier seasons when we know lots of our domestic visitors will travel.

So actually the autumn, winter, springtime, there's still amazing experiences that people can do.

But a lot of the work we do when we're educating the travel trade is actually to showcase maybe what's happening in the winter.

So for example, this year there's light trails, there's Christmas markets, businesses are launching different experiences.

We're seeing it all the time.

So that's a great way that we can help boost visits in the winter months.

I think another point to say on that as well is that working with different markets, it does help to kind of minimize the risk.

Maybe you might see a dip in one market.

It could be the domestic market or a certain European market.

So maybe by opening up yourselves to kind of working with a broader range of different audiences Again, it can help give you a bit of business security as well at different times of the year.

And obviously, we know what's been happening, the political situation in the past few months, and some markets may have seen a bit of a dip.

And that's actually where if you're working across a broader range of different audiences, then you can still help to secure bookings.