City of Culture contributes to record tourism for Coventry

A record number of tourists visited Coventry last year, providing a financial boost of £750m to the city's economy, with the rise attributed in part to the City of Culture festival.

The BBC reports that more than 11 million people paid a visit to the city in 2022, an increase of 3m from the previous year, and 1m more than the previous record in 2019.

In 2019, tourists brought in £600m in extra revenue to the city, and three years later, this rose to £750.86m, a report by Global Tourism Solutions reveals.

"Pre-pandemic we saw 10m visitors come to Coventry and we were celebrating that year," Paul Jones, the managing director of Destination Coventry told the BBC.

"The pandemic had a really decimating effect on our visitor economy, it wiped 60% off in terms of volume and value of visitors.

"We were hopeful 2022 would be a great year but we weren't sure if we'd get back to those pre-pandemic levels, so to add a million visitors on top of our record year, we were very happy."

"You can't deny the fact that the City of Culture programme really shone a spotlight on Coventry internationally."