Each month the Scattered Clouds blog takes a look at the wonderful world of tourism through a data and evidence-led lens, all in pursuit of transforming tourism sector data into insight of course!

A matter of confidence - August 2026

There are many ways in which confidence impacts tourism and this month I thought I’d make this my blog topic.

We’ll start with the concept of consumer confidence, and while it’s vital at the outset to accept that everyone is an individual with their own set of unique circumstances and attitudes, sometimes it’s handy to look at metrics that try to convey how the “typical” consumer is feeling.

Many organisations track overall consumer confidence, but the one I monitor most regularly comes courtesy of GfK, as it has been around for a long time, posing questions in the same way month after month. About 2,000 Brits are quizzed with the balance between those that answer five core questions positively versus negatively used to generate an “index score” that sits somewhere between -100 (everyone is deeply gloomy) and +100 (everyone is jumping for you). The questions cover past and future personal finances, past and future perceptions of the general economic situation and whether they feel it is a good time to make a major purchase.

All other things being equal (which they rarely are) one would expect the more buoyant is consumer confidence the greater the chances are that people will be up for days or nights out, or taking a holiday, with the opposite true when consumer confidence is in the doldrums.

In the decade from 1998 to 2007 the monthly index hovered at a value close to zero, occasionally up to a score of +5, occasionally a score as low as -5, telling us that on balance most people felt broadly comfortable, not too optimistic, but not too pessimistic either – a Goldilocks score I guess.

Then in late 2007, with an acceleration in 2008, consumers started to feel more than a tad twitchy about how things were going as the global financial crisis grabbed the headlines, with huge amounts of taxpayer money having to be used to prop up the banking sector. By July 2008 consumer confidence had fallen to a score of -36. It was 2014 before a single-digit negative score was next recorded, finally returning to a (low) positive score throughout 2015. We were back in modest negative territory from April 2016, with things deteriorating after the Brexit vote and subsequent period of political paralysis. By February 2020 a score of -7 suggested things were looking rosier, but we all know what happened next, and by April that year -34 was the headline score. A wave of very cautious optimism (though still on balance negative) set in by summer 2021 as lockdowns eased, only to start evaporating late in the year due to concerns about the Omicron variant, but it was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that saw confidence really tumble the next spring, followed by the shambles that was the Liz Truss “mini budget” a few months later, taking the monthly score to a record low of -49.

By 2023 we were back in the minus twenties, reaching the dizzy heights of -13 in July and August 2024, before dipping once more. Bringing things up to date in June we were on -23, before a six-point jump to -17 in July as the expectation of a change in who was running the government and (perhaps for some, and not in all areas of the UK of course) England’s progress in the Men’s FIFA World Cup boosted sentiment.

How have these ups and mostly downs impacted tourism? Well, the financial crisis certainly saw a recalibration in the appetite for outbound travel, or at least in terms of which destinations Brits favoured, thanks to the dramatic fall in the value of sterling, making foreign travel markedly more expensive. It was at this time that the media fell in love with the word staycation.

Plenty of research at the time demonstrated that we were desperate to cling on to our holidays and would happily change the type of destination, type of accommodation, or the duration of a trip as opposed to forfeiting our holidays altogether.

The plunge in consumer confidence at the time of the pandemic is correlated with a near cessation of holiday trips but acts as a good reminder that correlation and causation are not identical twins, it was the legal inability to go away rather than an absence of consumer confidence that was the leading driver of non-existent demand.

This is evidenced courtesy of the surge in trip taking once lockdowns ended, as although it coincides with an improvement in confidence as we have seen on balance most people still felt fairly gloomy.

The relationship between the amount of income we have at our disposal and the cost of those things we have or want to purchase is a leading determinant of how confident we feel and across the past decade we have morphed from people talking about the “squeezed middle” through to a fully blown “cost of living crisis”.

The excellent monthly sentiment tracker run by the national tourist boards asks a representative sample of Brits to choose one of five statements that best describes their feelings about how the “cost of living crisis” is affecting their financial circumstances.

Consistently over the past couple of years less than one-in-ten of us say “I’m one of the lucky ones – better off than before the crisis”, while a further one-in-four opt for “I’m alright – the cost-of-living crisis has not really affected me and confident it won’t”. That’s just over one-third of the population who we can assume are not having to change their holiday and leisure habits all that much as a result of financial concerns.

The answer picked by the largest contingent of respondents each month is “I’m cautious – things are OK but I feel I have to be very careful”. Arguably this is the cohort most eager to avail themselves of special offers of discounts that enable them to still do the things they want to but for a little less expense.

That leaves about one-fifth of the population (a proportion that hasn’t changed much in the past two years) who pick “I’ve been hard hit – no option but to cut back on spending”. Exactly what spending is “cut back” will vary, but for many it will primarily be on discretionary items, and the tourism and hospitality industry largely relies on discretionary spending.

Confidence plays a role for businesses as well as consumers, and a plethora of destinations and trade associations regularly track how confident visitor economy businesses are feeling. This matters because a business that is confident is more likely to hire people and more likely to look to invest in order to grow and/or become more productive. By contrast a business that lacks confidence might opt simply to tread water, believing it is too great a risk to grasp potential growth opportunities.

Here I thought I would look at results from a study called the Business Insights and Conditions Survey (BICS) run by the ONS, as it covers business across the visitor economy ecosystem (as well as business from all other industry sectors).

Responding businesses are asked a range of questions, including how they would assess their performance in the most recent month compared with the same month a year ago, and how they expect performance to change over the next twelve months. Published data is split by sector, allowing us to look at those that fall within the Accommodation and food service activities category and those under the Arts, entertainment and recreation grouping.

As confidence is about what’s to come rather than what’s in the proverbial rear-view mirror let’s look at what businesses have been saying in terms of the difference in the proportion who anticipate performance will increase and those anticipating a decrease (businesses can of course tick options to say they expect performance to stay the same or that they are not sure).

For Accommodation and food service activities businesses the net score was in negative territory every month from December 2024 through to May of this year, but fieldwork conducted during June revealed a score of +2 (as before this can sit within a range of -100 to +100).

The net score for the Arts, entertainment and recreation businesses has tended to be more upbeat in most months during the past few years, being positive in five out of the first six months of this year (April was the exception).

How the advent of a revitalised government and the announcement of a cut in business rates for pubs, social clubs and (some) music venues impacts sentiment in the coming months will be fascinating to watch. The budget (expected in late October or early November) will be a pivotal moment.

Another dimension of “confidence” is what we might term destination confidence, that is to say whether the reputation of a place leaves budding tourists with a sense of excitement or trepidation. There are some destinations with a longstanding challenge in terms of how confident international travellers would feel about visiting, for example not many would put Sudan or Iran high on their wish-list for places to go in the coming months.

In part this is a function of government advisories, but if we’re honest very few international travellers are likely to consult their version of the FCDO travel advice pages before deciding where to go, as most get their perceptions shaped by what they see in the media. Sadly the trend for this to be driven by content viewed on unregulated social media as opposed to mainstream media is of concern, for example there are those in the US who have misrepresented how safe Americans would be should they decide to holiday in London.

Last but certainly not least is what we might think of as personal confidence when it comes to tourism. There a plenty of aspects to this, for example how relaxed a person feels about going to a destination they have never been to before, whether they are bothered about not being able to speak or read the local language of a place, or, if they want to drive, how confident they are about going to a destination where this is done on the opposite side of the road to their home country. This is about someone’s persona and appetite for risk.

A cohort for whom this personal confidence is especially important are those with impairments – physical, sensory or cognitive.

These are consumers most likely to seek out information in advance about the destination, both in general terms but equally about the accommodation on offer, its proximity to visitor attractions and places to eat etc. There’s not all that much destinations can do about most of the aspects of confidence I have covered here, but this is the exception. Those with, or who are travelling with, a person with an impairment are arguably more likely to consult a tourist board website than are other potential visitors, so ensuring that information that will be helpful and reassuring is readily available (and accurate) is vitally important and may make the difference between someone choosing the destination or moving on to assess alternatives.

Confidence is a nebulous concept that’s tricky to convey neatly as a statistical metric, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t fundamental to the tourism choices made by consumers and businesses alike.