Liverpool’s tourism reaches record numbers

Dear readers — a rather wet welcome to your Monday briefing. Despite the downpour, we hope you still had a wonderful weekend and are ready to tuck into another week of journalistic offerings from Post HQ.

Catch up and coming up:

• Over the weekend, Laurence published a brilliant piece covering the history and future of Eastern Orthodoxy on Merseyside. It’s had lots of lovely feedback, as well as some more contentious ones — get involved in the debate here.
• Last week we also published another edition of Answers in The Post, this time digging into the data around green spaces in Liverpool and using maps to illustrate how less than 50% of residents have what is described as “good access” to parks and green spaces. An essential read with great visuals — click here to give it a go.
• This week, we’re digging into another important talking point for Answers in The Post: active travel. We’ll be exploring just how much building new infrastructure is costing the city, and compare those figures to other major cities across Europe. 
• We also have an exciting weekend read from Abi, where she visits one of Liverpool’s strange and lesser known cultural institutions. Stay tuned for that.

The big story: The reason behind Liverpool’s record tourist numbers 

Top line: In July, more hotel bookings were made in Liverpool city centre than ever before, according to the council. But what’s bringing so many visitors to our city?

Context: To many readers, 2004 will seem like a bygone era. The Capital of Culture was still four years away, Liverpool hadn’t won a European Cup since the 1980s, Steve Rotheram was a mere Fazakerley councillor, and Tyler Dibling was -2 years old. It’s also when the city began recording how many hotel rooms had been sold. And in all that time, no month has outperformed July 2025. According to data released by the city council, 195,000 rooms were booked, beating the previous record of 192,000 in August 2018.

That year, over two million tourists came to stay in the city centre. The pull factors then included diverse programming to celebrate ten years since the Capital of Culture, the arrival of Royal de Luxe’s Giants, LFC’s success in reaching the Champions League final, a Mathew Street Festival revival, the Terracotta Warriors coming to the World Museum, and International Beatleweek. But, remarkably, the council said 2025 is on course to beat 2018, with 1.25 million hotel rooms sold since January. 

"It's not just down to one thing," according to Nick Small, the cabinet member for growth and economy. "It's events, it's the great shopping, it's the great night-time economy... but it's also things like business tourism [and] conferences".

The news is especially good for the city as it follows the announcement earlier this year that hotels would bring in a £2 visitor charge to raise revenue for the tourist sector. Liverpool might have expected a drop in numbers after the levy came into effect in June, but it seems potential visitors were not dissuaded. 

Bill Addy, the CEO of Liverpool BID Company — which represents more than 351 retail and leisure businesses, including the 80 hotels that make up Accommodation BID, which voted in favour of the £2 levy’s introduction — said that "having this key marker of impact — of overnight stays and increased local spend — helps us to identify the events which will have the biggest impact on our hospitality and our cultural sectors.”

But what exactly brought so many people to Liverpool this summer? There was no Eurovision as in 2023, nor a series of Taylor Swift concerts like in 2024. Radio 1’s Big Weekend concluded in May. Both Dua Lipa and Bruce Springsteen played at Liverpool’s Anfield stadium, but that was in June, not the record-breaking July. The Beyond Van Gogh and Beyond Monet exhibitions may have helped, but surely there aren’t significantly more fans of post-Impressionist art than those of “The Boss”. And with respect to July’s Arab Arts Festival, the Biennial, and our editor Abi’s birthday, these are annual events unlikely to have significantly impacted tourism in relation to other years.

Suggests are welcome in the comments box. 

But if there was no single driving factor, if anything, this might suggest an even healthier situation for Liverpool. Figures suggest the city has been steadily building momentum since the lockdown years: 2024 was better for tourism than 2023, which was better than 2022. Last year, Liverpool topped a Which? poll to find the best big city break in the UK. According to the mayor’s office, around 60 million people visit the city region each year, which means a £6 billion annual visitor economy that employs more than 73,000 locals. 

We’ve expressed scepticism before about that 60 million figure, as that’s around 10 million more than Paris received the year it hosted the 2024 Olympic Games. But there’s little doubt Liverpool is increasingly benefiting from its ability to attract visitors and tourists. If you haven’t already, you may enjoy reading Laurence’s article from May examining the city from the perspective of its visitors and asking if they are getting their money’s worth. 

The picture that emerges is of a place leveraging its history, architecture and events planning to good effect. It may well be that events like Eurovision or big Anfield concerts help put Liverpool “on the map” for those who may not have considered it as a destination previously, and that the full benefits are not seen until months or even years later. 

There’s also the “come for the event, stay for the city” effect, where guests are drawn to Liverpool by a particular concert or festival and like the place so much they are enticed to return at a later date once the fuss dies down. For the aforementioned article, Laurence spoke to tourists who had originally come to Liverpool during Eurovision but returned two years later as they realised there was more to do than one trip could satisfy.

On the other hand, there can be a downside for locals and regular commuters at the time, which get forgotten about in the laudatory atmosphere. See, for instance, our piece about events in Sefton Park including the Big Weekend, which drew many ambivalent and even negative comments about the drawbacks for residents and regular park users. 

Bottom line: Though mindful of these complaints, we suspect it might be a while before Scousers become the Barcelonians or Venetians of the North, unable to move for Airbnbs, wringing their hands in futile dismay at the damage caused by cruise ships, or reduced to shooting tourists with water pistols in a desperate attempt to reclaim the city. Locals will hope the city does not become complacent about its attractiveness to tourists, but the fact that a successful local industry is apparently becoming more so is a rare opportunity to write about good news.

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Photo of the week

Last week Reddit was flooded with images of Liverpool transformed into Gotham as filming for the Batman spin-off series Clayface got underway. This Gotham ambulance was spotted in L1, with copies of the Gotham Gazette newspaper cropping up across town. 

Looks like we have a new competitor to worry about…

Have a photo you want to submit to The Post? Email it to editor@livpost.co.uk for a chance to be featured in our Monday briefings.

Your Post briefing

Liverpool Council are spending around £30,000 every year to let councillors park for free, according to a Freedom of Information request filed by the BBC. The council spends the money on parking permits for councillors for city centre car parks, but said they could only be used for “council related activities” and permits were cheaper than handling individual parking expenses. The news has angered night-time workers in the city, who — after changes to parking charges in recent months — have stressed they are now having to pay up to £10 to park before 11pm. 

Speaking of Freedom of Information requests (FOIs), last week Liverpool Council was issued with an enforcement notice over its failure to respond to them. According to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the council’s rate of response for the whole of 2025 is just 57%, with only 43% of requests responded to within the statutory 20 working days. There is also a current backlog of around 100 requests which are all overdue. Now, the ICO has told the council they must clear the backlog and attend regular meetings with them to report on progress. In a note sent to councillors, the council said its failure to respond was in part due to the high volume of requests it receives — around 1,500 per year. 

And St Helens Council has approved new measures to tackle ketamine usage. The decision comes after a report presented to the council showed a rise in use of the Class B drug — which is used medically for anaesthesia — amongst young people. The measures include providing education about the drug and its dangers in local schools and communities, in addition to calling on the government to reclassify the drug as Class A. "We recognised there was a problem early on, and got ahead of the game in terms of efforts to address the issue,” Andy Bowden, cabinet member for health, said. “ And that is not just happening here in our borough, but across the country."

Recommended watch: Mona & Mimi

Readers may remember Laurence’s recent preview of Mona & Mimi at the Unity Theatre, as well as his interview with playwright Catherine Leen. 

Well, the good news is that the play is a triumph. Depicting a fictionalised meeting between Mona Best, the Liverpool club owner who was one of The Beatles’ first champions, and Mrs Mary Elizabeth “Mimi” Smith, John Lennon’s aunt and guardian, Mona & Mimi sparkles with witty, crowd-pleasing dialogue and two excellent and endearing lead performances by Fiona Boylan and Meriel Scholfield. (Noah Fox, who plays the Beatles’ road manager Neil Aspinall, is also very good.) 

Leen’s mastery of believable but entertaining back-and-forth exchanges belies the fact she is a first-time playwright. Although additional knowledge of history — for example, that Best’s son Pete would be replaced as the band’s drummer, and their family’s contribution forgotten in the popular imagination — adds a poignant dramatic irony, it’s perfectly possible to enjoy the performance without being a Beatles expert. 

The bad news is that the play only ran for two nights, so if you want to see it you’ll have to wait. However, Leen and co. are very keen to bring Mona & Mimi to a larger audience, with ambitions to tour it in the UK and Leen’s home country of Ireland. As the Unity was packed to the rafters the night Laurence attended, they should have every chance. If any theatre producers are reading this, either in Liverpool or further afield, this could be a chance worth taking.

Did you catch Mona & Mimi at the Unity Theatre? If so, tell us what you thought below.

Post Picks

📚On Wednesday, author Jacqueline Wilson heads to West Kirby Grammar School for a talk to celebrate the publication of her second adult novel, Picture Imperfect. Tickets here.

🎵On Thursday, the Cavern Club is hosting a night of live music in aid of Liverpool CHICS Children's Cancer Support. Expect performances from Tin Can Voodoo, The Thomas Bradley Project, The Waltones and more. Tickets here.

🍸 On Saturday, an award winning gin and cultural tour of some of the coolest bars and secret drinking dens in town is running from 1:30pm to 4:30pm. It begins at Buyers Club — meet there and find out more details here.