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Manchester closes gap on Edinburgh in tourism leaderboard

Manchester is closing the gap on Edinburgh as the second most popular destination in the UK for international visitors to Britain.

According to provisional figures released by Visit Britain and the Office of National Statistics, Manchester has experienced a 15.4% rise in visitors from 811,000 in 2010 to 936,000 in 2011.

Compared with Edinburgh’s unchanged 1.3m figure, this has narrowed the gap with the Scottish capital to just 364,000.

The provisional data has been released as part of the International Passenger Survey, a study conducted each year by VisitBritain and the Office of National Statistics.

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.

“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 Manchester have also seen a rise of 100,000, from 1m in 2010 to 1.1m in 2011.

Birmingham sits under Manchester on the leaderboard with 732,000, followed by Liverpool at 545,000.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Tom Keighley .