Glasgow Overtakes Edinburgh as Tourist Capital of Scotland
Published by Anne Marie Hughes on Sat 09 Jun 12 @ 22:11
Glasgow has overtaken Edinburgh as the country's top tourist destination, with visitors to the city spending a whooping £430m so far this year.
Accountancy firm PKF examined turnover in the leisure sector and August proved to be a superb month for Glasgow. Hotel occupancy rates were calculated at 91.1%, based on a sample of the 8,564 hotel rooms within a 10-mile radius of Glasgow.
Over the first eight months of the year, Glasgow again fared better than its East-coast counterpart, with 78.3% of hotel rooms reported as continually full, 4% higher than Edinburgh.
Hotels are calculated to have raked in around £180m so far in 2011, with a further £260m being spent on food and drink in the city's many bars, restaurant and nightclubs, as well as over the counters in the rows of stylish shops which populate the 'Style Mile'.
These figures actually make Glasgow busier most of Britain's other major cities including Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Belfast, Leeds and Liverpool. Such claims are backed up by Glasgow City Marketing Bureau's estimate that in the month of August alone, 375,000 'room nights' were sold at a value of £23m to the hotel industry.
The leisure industry's success also does little to dispel murmurs surrounding the Rough Guide to Travel's assessment earlier in the year of Glasgow as a city which isn't a capital but should be.
In fact, when you put the numbers into perspective and look at the string of major events which the city has hosted, including this months MOBO Awards and the filming of World War Z and Cloud Atlas, not to mention the huge number of large conferences which take place on a weekly basis you can see why there really is a buzz around Glasgow at the moment.
Long may it continue.
