Switzerland Gaining Popularity With Visitors from the UK

01.03.2024 - 08:37 / breakingtravelnews.com / London St Pancras

A stellar December with double-digit growth in hotel overnights from the UK helped make 2023 the most successful year for travel from the UK to Switzerland in over a decade. Compared to 2019 – before Covid – Switzerland recorded +2.8% of hotel overnight stays of UK travellers in 2023.
At a recent conference in Zurich, Switzerland Tourism announced that of all European countries, the results for the UK stood out.

Recording a total of 1.7 million hotel overnights in 2023, overnight stays from the UK increased steadily from month to month compared to 2019, culminating in a very strong December and a 2.8% increase compared to pre-Covid times: namely, the best result in over ten years for the UK.

2023 hotspots included Geneva and Zurich, helped by a resurgence in business tourism, as well as the Lake Lucerne Region in central Switzerland, which saw the strongest growth of any Swiss holiday destination.

According to Oxford Economics, Switzerland’s market share of travellers from the UK compared to all European destinations increased as well. The UK is the second most important market for Switzerland in Europe, and the third most important globally. The generally positive development underlines the important role of tourism in Switzerland, being one of its five major export sectors.

“Going forward, in our marketing activities, our goal is to encourage our visitors to ‘travel better’. This means for example, promoting specific regions and seasons to potential travellers, and, as part of our Swisstainable programme, to help them to travel as sustainably as possible,” says Alex Herrmann, Director of Switzerland Tourism UK & Ireland.

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“Also, for the UK market, we will further intensify our collaboration with the travel trade, particularly tour operators who can help us to achieve these goals.”

Switzerland’s panoramic trains are more popular than ever in the UK, increasingly also outside the high season. Several British tour operators have added new tours after Covid, some of which include train travel from London St Pancras to Switzerland via Paris. Generally, there has been an increasing focus on summer in the Swiss Alps over the last few years.

“We are keen to welcome more UK visitors to Switzerland in the late summer and autumn, and share with them everything that Switzerland has to offer in these two seasons, whether it’s travelling on lesser-known panoramic trains or exploring all the beautiful Swiss cities and mountain destinations that UK visitors haven’t really been to yet.” says Alex Herrmann.