The number of visitors heading to the resort is up by 1.5% on the previous year with a 6.5% increase on money spent in the town.
These findings are contained in the latest independent research for 2018 commissioned by the Visitor Economy Team at Liverpool City Region Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP).
Latest figures show Liverpool City Region’s Visitor Economy is now worth over £4.9bn, and last year welcomed 67.3m visitors to the region and supports over 57,000 jobs.
Headline figures for Southport show:
- Visitor Numbers – 9.2 million – 1.5% Increase
- Staying visitors – 772,000 – 2.1% Increase
- Economic Impact – £590 million – 6.5% increase
- Total Employment 6,967 – 3.1% Increase
Headline city region-wide figures show:
- Visitor numbers – 67.3 million – 5% increase
- Staying visitors 5.5 million – 3.8% increase
- Total Employment – 57,000 – 6.7% increase
These figures are published by the STEAM (Scarborough Tourism Economic Activity) model, which is used throughout the UK tourism industry to measure economic impact of the visitor economy, and International Passenger Survey. The results are calculated using a range of tourism inputs including hotel occupancy, transport figures, attractions attendance figures and event figures.
Cllr Ian Maher, Labour Leader at Sefton Council, said: “There is a real ‘wow’ factor to these figures that have just been published and for all the right reasons.
“We all know how important tourism is to Southport, Sefton and the wider city region and these figures confirm how important we all are as a destination to millions of tourists every year.
“It clearly shows that tourism across Sefton continues to rise and the borough really is open for all businesses.
“Visitors regularly come from all over the UK and beyond to Sefton for our superb attractions, our busy and varied events programme, wonderful hotels, superb shops and entertaining nightlife and long may this continue.”
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