London seems increasingly to be the place that keyboard warriors and malign bots love to hate, to the extent that Sir Sadiq Khan will be launching a new £7 million mayoral tourism campaign later this year to counter a “flood of disinformation being peddled online”.
New City Hall analysis tells a more upbeat story, though, in which London remains one of the world’s most visited cities. It finds that there were 36 million overnight visits to London in 2024 compared to 33.7 million in pre-pandemic 2019, and that the numbers of nights stayed in the capital in those years were respectively 153.9 million and 146.4 million. It was certainly busy in South Kensington the other day, as I battled through the crowds queuing for the museums and tried to find an outdoor seat for a drink on Exhibition Road.
Visitors continue to flock to London, the Mayor told the London Assembly recently, to “experience our world-class museums and galleries, visit our historic attractions, and enjoy a vast array of sporting events”. The city is the “undisputed world champion of large-scale live music events” according to the Standard, the West End is “strengthening its position as a global theatre powerhouse”, surging ahead of Broadway, and the British Museum, Tate Modern and the National Gallery remain in the top ten most visited “art museums” in the world.
However, the City Hall analysis also reveals that some visitor patterns have changed since the pandemic. Notably, the bounce-back has been led by the Brits, for whom London clearly hasn’t lost its allure. Although international visitors still accounts for 58 per cent of total “visitor nights”, the overall total was slightly smaller in 2024 than in 2019, reducing from 118.4 million to 116.6 million. Though bolstered by more Americans, Chinese and Japanese visitor numbers declined. Meanwhile, domestic tourism went up by a third in terms of visitor nights, rising from 28 million in 2019 to 37.3 million in 2024.
Where are they all staying? That’s another change since 2019. The City Hall report says there’s been a shift in the balance between “unserviced” Airbnb-type accommodation and the “serviced” kind, meaning hotels, B&Bs, guest houses and so on, calculating that the unserviced range accounted for 10.2 per cent in 2024, up from 8.7 per cent in 2019). In absolute numbers, unserviced accommodation nights rose from 12.8 million to 15.6 million out of the overall 153.9 million.
The inner London boroughs, Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea and Camden in particular, will nonetheless chalk that up as a success, following more enforcement of the city’s 90-day cap on short-term letting of entire properties, designed to stem the loss of homes available for permanent residents.
On the other hand, despite City Hall guidance aiming to “allow Londoners to earn a little extra money” and not to “provide opportunities for the commercial sector”, that’s exactly what seems to be happening. “Private room” listings are down substantially while “entire home” lettings are up, the analysis finds, leaving the sector looking increasingly like a “professional market, rather than one of casual home use”.
What about the future? The City Hall analysis forecasts visitor night demand rising from its 2024 total of 154 million to 224 million by 2050, requiring an additional 66,000 hotel rooms over the period. None of this is a given, though. Uncertainties around economic growth, interest rates and “consumer preferences”, plus the chance of unexpected shocks to supply or demand, make longer-term projections less reliable, the analysis warns.
Hotels have so far been able to offset substantial increases in operating costs since 2019, including a 28 per cent hike in labour costs, by pushing prices up, but there may be a limit to how much visitors are prepared to pay. Forecast numbers could be lower if infrastructure improvements, not least the proposed expansion of Heathrow, stall, and moves towards tighter tourism management, as in Amsterdam and Barcelona, could have an impact too.
There’s a lot at stake, because tourism is big business, contributing more than £41 billion to the capital’s economy each year, and supporting 640,000 jobs in the capital – one in 10 London jobs. Hence exhortations in Sir Sadiq’s draft new London Plan for the boroughs to support new hotel development, both in the city centre and in town centres and high streets. Wherever you live in London, new hotels could be coming your way.
City Hall also continues to support retailers’ calls for the reinstatement of VAT-free shopping for international visitors, which was scrapped after Brexit. It has been estimated that as a result nearly £1.4 billion in West End sales has been lost since 2023, with Chinese tourists in particularly taking their custom elsewhere.
It was perhaps no coincidence that Khan announced his new tourism campaign in Singapore, given City Hall’s recent deep dive finding a preponderance of online disinformation about London targeting east and south-east Asian audiences. Or that he’s taking action to improve Oxford Street, which attracts more than 120 million visitors each year but, as New London Architecture’s David Taylor noted this week, must currently leave many of them “slightly disappointed”.
The Mayor’s immediate challenge though will be whether to implement a visitor levy, or “tourist tax”, with legislation granting him that power expected to be passed in the autumn. The details remain to be determined, but with recent modelling suggesting a three per cent levy could raise some £350 million a year, Khan looks set to press ahead, despite industry concerns.
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