Tourism stocks surge on strong UK travel data

UK tourism continues to boom thanks to the weak pound, enticing more visitors from around the world to the UK and strongly boosting spending.

Some 3.7m people visited Britain from overseas in April, up 19% year on year, the Office for National Statistics said on Friday, with overseas residents making 42% more visits to the UK for holidays.

Spending on visits to the UK rose 20% to a seasonally adjusted £2.2bn, though visitor numbers and spending were both boosted by Easter falling in April this year and March last year.

Over the three months to April, the number of visits to the UK increased by 11% from 8.1m to 8.9m compared to the three months to April 2016, which was led by a 19% increase in visitors from North America and a 7% increase from EU countries.

Over the three months to April, it was up 14% year-on-year at £6.2bn.

In contrast, trips by British residents abroad in the month increased by just 2% to 6.1m, with holiday visits up 4.6% to 3.69m and spending overseas down 1% to £3.5bn. Visits abroad were up just 1% year -on-year in the three months to April at 14.9m.

European tourists were a big boon to the UK economy in the month, with an increase of 17.2% to 2.9m from 2.5m.

North American tourists numbers swelled 13% to 320,000 from 282,000.

While April data was boosted by the later Easter, there is "a clear underlying increase in foreign visits to the UK", said Howard Archer, chief economic adviser to the EY ITEM Club.

Against this data vista, travel and tourism stocks were on the rise on Friday, with Thomson travel owner TUI up 2.2%, EasyJet up 1.7%, InterContinental Hotels up 1.5%, Wizz Air up 1.5%, Premier Inn owner Whitbread up 0.3%, Ryanair up 0.3%, and British Airways owner IAG up 0.3%.

Leisure groups such as restaurants and pubs, which also benefit from the tourist influx, were shown in the Coffer Peach report earlier this week to have endured a flat month in May, amid a slowdown in consumer spending coming from a squeeze on UK households from inflation and soft wage growth, but were mostly higher on Friday.

JPMorgan Cazenove analysts said they could not see what would be likely to materially boost UK consumer confidence.

"Fears around terrorist attacks and political and economic uncertainty will almost certainly linger and won’t help spending. As always, much will depend on the weather in determining pub LFLs."

On the upside, the Met Office’s long-range weather forecast is for temperatures to be above normal for the time of year over the next 30 days, with dry, settled weather expected from early July.