Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Friday the 21st of March,

which means we're properly into springtime, which means the people, I hope, are going to be thinking about great days out.

I always look forward at this time of year to the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions results of visitor figures from the previous year.

And here they are freshly arrived. They make fascinating reading. To find out more,

the director of Alva, Bernard Donahue, OBE joins me. Bernard, first of all, give us the highlights.

Are you a happy man? Uncongenously happy. Yeah, first of all, give us the highlights. Are you a happy man? I'm congenitally happy.

Yeah, there are good reasons for optimism looking at these visitor figures today. I think if I was an

economist, I'll say slow, but steady growth, I think the cost of living crisis is still absolutely

with us. So people are making really tactical choices very clearly about how

they spend their leisure pounds and their leisure hours. But we have seen about 3.2% of growth

across visitor attractions across the UK. So room for optimism. Can I talk through some of the

detail? And my goodness, you have produced a formidable piece of work here. But I'm looking at

the top 20. All the attractions are either

in or very close to London or Edinburgh. And my goodness, you've got four UK nations. And the

top ranked attraction in Northern Ireland is only 35th, the absolutely marvellous Titanic

Belfast. In Wales, the top one St. Fagans is 58, and everything is just

completely centred on London. And if it isn't centered on London, it's centered on Edinburgh. And that's

not great news for UK tourism, is it? No, one of the things that this government, and indeed

the last government actually tasked Visit Britain to do, was to use London as a starting point for the tour or a catalyst,

if you like, a gate opener. Actually, I co-chair the Tourism Advisory Board for London

and Partners essentially visit London. And we're very conscious of the fact that London hosts

52, in a normal year, including last year, London hosts about 52% of all of the overseas visitors to the UK.

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