The Scottish tourism sector currently contributes over £4 billion GVA to the Scottish economy.Offering an exciting and diverse range of activities and attractions, Scotland welcomes 15 million international and domestic visitors each year . These visitors cite a wide variety of reasons for visiting Scotland, including the scenery, culture, and the diverse number of activities on offer.
A growing area of interest is adventure tourism. Many visitors to Scotland choose to take part in activities such as mountain biking, walking and water sports. The 2008 Visitor Experience Survey by VisitScotland found 28% of overseas visitors chose to visit Scotland because of the opportunity to take part in outdoor activities. Further reearch by Tourism Intelligence Scotland has shown that the adventure sports market in 2008 received 253,000 visitors, and generated a spend in the region of £66 million. The figure for walking was even higher with over 1.5 million visits and a total spend of £520 million.
Scotland is now recognised as a world class destination for a number of adventure sports, with the 7 Stanes mountain biking trails in the south of Scotland receiving more than 400,000 visitors per year, Ayrshire last year playing host to the British Kite Surfing Championships and Fort William securing the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup until 2013, an event which attracts around 20,000 spectators.
Another important area of sports tourism in Scotland is golf. The Scottish Government values the Scottish golf tourism industry at around £220 million, with 135,000 golfers visiting Scotland’s 550 golf courses each year.
Scotland will also benefit from the hosting of a number of major sporting events over the coming years, in particular the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, and the 2014 Ryder Cup, which will be held at Gleneagles in Perthshire. The former is expected to attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors to Glasgow over the course of the Games, with the NWDA Commonwealth Games Benefits Survey from the Manchester Games in 2002 placing visitor numbers to Manchester at more than one million over 10 days, with a net expenditure of £18 million.
The Ryder Cup, which is regarded as the third biggest event in sport, is expected to attract more than 45,000 spectators each day to Gleneagles, building on the success of the 2010 Open Championships at St Andrews, which EventScotland research showed to have generated a combined £100 million economic benefit to Scotland, including a £52.6 million destination marketing benefit.