Scotland’s International Opportunity: From Visitor Growth to Local Value

From Australia and East Asia to the Netherlands and Germany, Scotland is actively developing international travel-trade relationships. But attracting higher-value visitors requires more than a beautiful itinerary.

Scotland’s international tourism market is growing. But for specialist operators, the opportunity is not simply to attract more visitors. It is to understand which markets to target, what those visitors will pay for, how the product should be structured, and how it can reach customers beyond the domestic market.

Scotland welcomed 4.4 million international overnight trips in 2024, generating approximately £4.0 billion in international visitor spend. International visitors accounted for 29% of overnight tourism visits but 54% of overnight tourism spend, making international tourism disproportionately important to the value of Scotland’s visitor economy.

For specialist tourism businesses, however, national figures are only the beginning.

The real commercial question is:

Where is the opportunity, what product does that market want, and can a Scottish business deliver it profitably?

That is the question we have been exploring through recent market research and commercial modelling for specialist tourism propositions.

Not simply “more tourists”

Scotland has an obvious attraction: landscape. Recently, this landscape has been at the centre of a blockbuster: The Odyssey. Some of us may have recognised the Pathfoot Building (University of Stirling) in the Netflix TV series The Bombing of Pan Am 103. And the list could go on. Scotland is on the map. On an increasingly international map. But landscape alone is not a commercial proposition.

At NorthStar, we work with hospitality businesses, and we have seen that an increase in tourism activity does not necessarily translate into proportional economic growth for the businesses and communities surrounding it.

As previously argued, the hospitality landscape is changing. Larger realities are increasingly being acquired by major groups, while independent hospitality businesses are choosing to close or struggling to maintain a sustainable customer base. At the same time, cafes and food businesses can appear extremely busy, particularly when hotel guests and day visitors converge on any of our lovely Scottish towns.

At first sight, this looks like a healthy tourism economy.

But footfall is not the same as economic value.

A visitor staying in a large hotel may arrive by coach, eat within the hotel, book excursions through the hotel or its established partners, and leave again without spending very much with independent businesses in the surrounding town.

The hotel may therefore be busy while the wider local retail economy may not see a proportional share of those benefits.

This distinction matters.

The question for a destination should not simply be:

How many visitors are we attracting?

It should also be:

Where does the money go once they arrive?

And:

How much of the visitor economy remains within the local business ecosystem?

This is particularly relevant as larger hospitality groups develop increasingly integrated offers: accommodation, food and beverage, transport, excursions, tour buses and established relationships with travel intermediaries.

These models can be commercially efficient and attractive to visitors. They can also create a greater concentration of visitor spending within a relatively small number of businesses. For independent tourism and hospitality businesses, competing simply for more footfall may therefore be the wrong strategy.

The more interesting question is whether they can create distinctive products and experiences that capture a greater share of visitor value. This is where Scotland’s international tourism opportunity becomes particularly interesting.

Our research indicates that the less-visited northern regions already attract a substantial international audience, although the available data does not provide a single official figure for a defined “hidden north” tourism market. Our working estimate puts international visitation to the wider northern region at approximately 600,000–700,000 visitors annually, with significant uncertainty around the geographical definition.

That distinction matters.

A commercial forecast should not present an estimated regional market as though it were an official statistic.

Instead, the estimate becomes a planning variable.

We can then ask:

• What happens if demand grows slowly?
• What happens if international demand grows at a moderate rate?
• What happens if higher-value specialist tourism grows faster?
• How much of that market could an independent operator realistically capture?
• And, importantly, how much of the visitor spend could remain within the local economy?

Our working scenarios use approximately 2%, 4% and 6% annual growth, producing an illustrative range of roughly 0.7–0.8 million annual international visits to the region by 2031. These are planning scenarios rather than official forecasts.

That is a much more useful way of thinking about the market than simply saying “Tourism to Scotland is growing.”

From visitor numbers to local value

Tourism growth does not automatically create value for every business in a destination.

If hotels, tour operators and travel intermediaries increasingly control the visitor journey, independent businesses cannot simply wait for visitors to walk through their doors. They need to understand how visitors move through the destination and where they can become part of that journey.

A hotel may have the rooms. A tour operator may have the transport. A travel adviser may have the international customer. A local business may have the food, the history, the craft, the guide, the experience or the story that makes the journey distinctive.

The opportunity is to connect these assets.

A hotel could refer guests to a local experience. A guide could build an itinerary around independent restaurants, historic sites and local producers. A distillery could become part of a specialist food and drink route. A DMC or travel adviser could bring international customers to a collection of smaller Scottish businesses.

This is what a local tourism network can do. It does not necessarily require another formal partnership or another networking event. It starts with understanding the visitor journey.

Who brings the visitor here? Where do they stay? How do they travel? What do they want to do? What are they willing to pay for? Who makes the booking? And where does the money go? These questions can reveal opportunities that are not immediately obvious.

But collaboration also needs to make commercial sense. A small tourism business does not need a 100-page market report before making its first partnership. It does need to understand its competitors, its customers, its suppliers and its own costs.

If a business agrees to sell an experience for £500, it should know whether that experience costs £300 or £450 to deliver. Otherwise, collaboration can simply create more work without creating more profit.

Good tourism networks therefore need both local knowledge and commercial intelligence.

The objective is not simply to bring more people into a destination.

It is to create experiences that allow more of the value generated by those visitors to remain within the local business ecosystem.

What could a local tourism network actually look like?

The network itself can become part of the product.

Have a tourism idea?

Test the business case before you scale it.

NorthStar helps Scottish tourism and hospitality businesses assess markets, pricing, competition, distribution and commercial opportunities before committing significant resources to growth.

Discuss your project with us.