Liverpool’s £1.2bn ($2.2bn) a year tourist industry is one of the city’s most visible growth industries. While this year’s European Capital of Culture celebrations have focused international attention on the wealth of tourist attractions in Liverpool’s city centre, Merseyside has a much wider range of tourist facilities than most European cities of its size.
It has the biggest density of art galleries and museums outside London and boasts Royal Birkdale and Royal Hoylake, two of the UK’s top Open championships golf courses, Aintree, home of the Grand National horse race, as well as a range of other iconic attractions such as the Gormley statues on Crosby sands. Southport, 16 miles north of Liverpool city centre, has been reinventing itself as one of the UK’s top seaside resorts.
Liverpool’s attractions as a tourist destination have been boosted by its role as a Unesco world heritage site and vibrant culture. Visitors from around the world are drawn by its role as the birthplace of the Beatles music phenomenon and home to two of the UK’s top football teams.
“We have trebled overseas visitor numbers in three years”, says Martin King, the Mersey Partnership’s director of tourism, “overtaking cities like Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol and Bath in terms of popularity.”
The Capital of Culture effect has widened Liverpool’s lead. Andrea Nixon, executive director of Tate Liverpool, the most visited modern and contemporary art gallery outside London, says that its 750,000 visitor target for the current year was reached in the first five months.
Even before the Capital of Culture year, Liverpool ranked as the sixth most important tourist destination in the UK after London, Edinburgh, Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow. Indeed, the latest Condé Nast traveller guide puts it in third place behind London and Edinburgh. “We are coming up fast on the rails”, says Mr King.
Liverpool John Lennon Airport (JLA), the UK’s fastest-growing regional airport, has nearly doubled its passenger traffic over the last five years to 5.5m. The growth has been driven by inbound foreign visitors, whose proportion of total traffic has risen from 19 per cent to 28 per cent, with particularly strong growth from Ireland, Poland and Spain.
Liverpool has also been remedying the two most obvious weaknesses in its tourism offering – the lack of top-quality hotels and convention facilities. Several hotels have opened over the past couple of years and more are being built.
But it is Liverpool’s bid to exploit its underdeveloped business tourism potential that will determine the long-term fate of the city’s heavy investment in new hotel capacity.
The opening, at the start of the year, of the £164m Liverpool Arena and Convention Centre on the Mersey waterfront has been a big benefit. The complex, consisting of the 10,600-seat Echo Arena and the adjacent BT Convention Centre, means that Liverpool can now compete in the premier league of conference destinations. It has attracted high-profile events ranging from the MTV European Music awards to the BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards and is already taking bookings for 2013.
Bob Prattey, ACC’s chief executive, estimates the complex will deliver £160m of economic benefit to Merseyside this year and £200m next, with the convention centre being the main economic driver.
The opening last October of the new £17m cruise liner terminal at Liverpool’s historic Pier Head, where millions of European emigrants once left for the New World, is another important addition to the tourism infrastructure. Giant cruise ships such as the Crown Princess, carrying more than 3,000 passengers, can now dock within walking distance of the city’s leading tourist and shopping attractions.
Although Liverpool is better placed than almost all its regional rivals, in terms of its tourist assets, there is still plenty of room for improvement.
Mr Prattey, for example, told a recent Northwest Insider magazine seminar that Liverpool was great at doing one-off events, such as the Open golf or the Grand National. But the quality of its hotels and restaurants still needed improving if it was to maximise the cross-selling benefits of tourism.
Whether Liverpool can enjoy a lasting legacy from the 2008 Capital of Culture celebrations will depend largely on visitor numbers continuing to rise in 2009 and beyond. For Phil Redmond, the TV producer who is the public face of the Capital of Culture, this is the acid test.
Tourism, he says, “will become an ever-increasing part not just of the city region’s economy, but its survival”.
Download this report