London’s Tourism Direct GVA (TDGVA) in 2019 is estimated by taking London’s share of the latest ONS regional TDGVA publication (2013) and multiplying it with the latest TDGVA estimate (2017) for the UK. The resulting figure is then multiplied with a ratio of London spend data from VisitBritain’s International Passenger Surveys from 2019 and 2017. This approach assumes 1) that London’s share of UK TDGVA has remained constant from 2013 to 2017 and 2) a constant relation between spend and GVA from 2017 to 2019.
The annual VisitBritain forecast for the volume and value of inbound tourism to the UK is issued in December each year. They have however updated this to reflect the impact of COVID-19 on inbound tourism to the UK, as well as an estimate of impact on domestic tourism within England. These were used to estimate London’s tourism spend for 2020. More details on the inbound tourism forecast for 2020 to the UK and domestic tourism with in England for 2020 can be found at Visit Britain.