Tourism figures on the rise
MANCHESTER is closing the gap on Edinburgh as the second-most popular destination in the UK for international visitors, according to new tourism figures.
Provisional figures show that the city witnessed a 15% rise in visitor numbers in 2011 to 936,000 (2010: 811,000), maintaining its third place on the table. It is also still some distance from Edinburgh, which entertains around 1.3m tourists a year.
The provisional figures from VisitBritain and the Office of National Statistics also reveal that Liverpool ousted Glasgow as the fifth-most visited city, behind Birmingham in fourth place.
Liverpool welcomed around 545,000 visitors to the city last year.
Paul Simpson, managing director of Visit Manchester, said: “A visitor increase of this size is clearly great news for the city.
“The ongoing route development at Manchester Airport and an increasing number of international conferences in the city has really made its mark.
He added: “Our activity in 2012 will focus on a number of cities across Europe with direct flights into Manchester and we will continue to ‘warm up’ markets on the West Coast USA and China, particularly Hong Kong.”
The international visitor figures to Greater as a whole Manchester have also seen a rise of 100,000 – from 1m in 2010 to 1.1m in 2011.
