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More visitors are coming to Jersey and whilst here they spent around £268million - the most since 2011 – but Visit Jersey are still lagging behind on their ultimate goal of attracting one million tourists by 2030.
The figures come from the tourism promotion body’s latest Annual Report, which compiles visitor statistics from 2018 which give a general picture of year-on-year growth, but the numbers are still falling behind targets for where they want to be in just over a decade.
The total number of visitors that came to Jersey last year was 725,416 – a 3% rise on the 2017 total, but falling 5% short of the target set out in Visit Jersey’s Destination Plan, a document laying out their ambitions.
Of these, 415,000 came to Jersey for leisure - exceeding the 2015 target by 43,000 - and 48% of them visited the island for the very first time in 2018.
Pictured: The majority of visitors to the island in 2018 were here for leisure.
The report shows that the majority of tourists visited from the UK, closely followed by France and then Guernsey.
Spend was up by 10% from 2017, with tourists loosening their purse strings to the tune of around £268million over the whole year, but again, this falls 5% shy of Visit Jersey’s 2015 hopes. The government-funded body claims that £36.4million of this is “directly attributable” to their own work.
This total spend will have to almost double in just over a decade if the body is to attain its goal of attracting one million visitors spending £500million in Jersey by 2030.
Pictured: Most visitors to the island came from the UK (Visit Jersey).
On an individual basis, visitors generally spend the most on accommodation and food and drink, followed by retail spending and transport.
In his foreword to the report, Visit Jersey Chairman Kevin Keen wrote: “We remain confident that an amazing place like Jersey can attract many more visitors than current and are determined to ensure the campaigns and our always-on marketing is compelling.
“However, we remain dependent on external factors and of course retaining our diverse and quite extensive transport links to the island. We know progress will never be linear, but progress it is.”
Pictured: Although the stats show year-on-year growth, the body is still lagging behind its ambitions for 2030 (Visit Jersey).
Visit Jersey’s financial report shows that, in 2018, they received a £5million grant from the Government. The table shows that they finished the financial year with a “deficit” of £52,638 compared with a surplus of £132,338, but Visit Jersey CEO Keith Beecham told Express that this was a “planned investment” in their marketing provision which they funded by dipping into their reserves from the previous year.
“Essentially it was carried forward from the previous year, we didn’t spend that money in the 2017 period… in 2017, towards the end of the year we carried forward the £52,000 because it made a better business decision to spend that money in 2018 than to spend it in 2017,” he explained.
In 2018, therefore, Visit Jersey spent £3,575,819 on marketing, £886,623 on staffing and £663,413 on “other operating costs.”
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