Wales, Yorkshire, Northern Ireland and the East Midlands Show Highest Reduction in Town Centre Visitors as Economic Impacts and Bad Weather Hit High Streets Across the UK

Place Informatics, the leading provider of footfall and location visitor behaviour data monitoring in the UK, has published a national visitor data report giving a detailed overview of town centre footfall across the UK in the first half of 2024.

The report gives detailed insights into town centres and shows that visitor numbers have decreased by 2.71% across the UK in June compared to last year. However, this decrease seems to hopefully be turning a corner as the latest report shows a more positive comparison year on year than May which had a footfall reduction of 4.2%.

This troubling trend in town centre footfall can be attributed to several factors, including an unusually wet Spring and early Summer, combined with economic challenges such as the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, however, as inflation remains fairly steady this trend may be changing.

The report explores the footfall dynamics both nationally and across 12 regions in the UK for the year 2023, with a specific emphasis on analysing fluctuations in foot traffic every month with a comparative analysis of footfall data from the previous year. The majority of regions showed an increase in month-on-month visitors but Wales, Yorkshire, Northern Ireland and the East Midlands continued to show a decline with the East Midlands also having the highest year-on-year decrease of 4.61%.

Since 2015, Place Informatics has been at the forefront of foot traffic data innovation, providing crucial insights into how people interact with town centres, retail outlets, tourist attractions, heritage sites, green spaces, events, and car parks. Leveraging advanced technologies such as machine learning, these big data solutions are helping to transform the industry.

Clive Hall, CEO of Place Informatics, commented, “Our visitor behaviour data report hopefully shows the start of a positive trend in visitor numbers as the summer holidays begin. After a prolonged decline in footfall, it is crucial for local councils and businesses to understand the factors that can help drive visitor increases and ensure town centres begin to show some growth in 2024.

Our data can help retailers, hospitality, councils and many other businesses and services understand how visitors are behaving, where visitors come from and most importantly what services they are utilising on their visit, including green spaces, car parks and public realms.”