As soon as the date of the coronation was announced last October, Kathryn Mooney booked a flight to London. “I jumped on it right away,” says Mooney, 54, an executive assistant from Toronto. “All I thought was, I’d better get a property, I’d better get a flight, because I knew there would be huge demand.”
Why did she want to come? “I know it sounds really hokey, but I want to go and send them some support and love from the sidelines. And honour the queen.”
Although she admits she does not quite have the same esteem for King Charles III as she had for his mother, she says the royals still “represent the palaces, they represent the pageantry – and that’s something that I want to experience. I want to see this. I want to feel it. Because in North America we don’t have anything even close.”
Mooney will certainly not be the only person flying to the UK for the coronation – but just how many will there be? A common argument in defence of the royal family is the benefit they bring to the UK economy through tourism. But despite widespread claims of their tourist value, firm evidence that the Windsors are what bring visitors to Britain is hard to come by, with most assertions anecdotal or speculative. The storm-tossed tourist industry may be desperately hoping for a coronation bump, but the benefit the event will bring is not clear.
“The problem is that attaching any causality to anything in tourism is exceptionally difficult,” admits Joss Croft, the CEO of UK Inbound, which represents the incoming tourist industry. “Why do people travel to the UK? Actually picking out a particular element as to why people have decided to come at a particular time is almost impossible.”
For some, of course, the coronation is an uncomplicated plus. “For us, it’s a great boon for business,” says Lana Bennett, the CEO of Tours International, a specialist inbound tour operator that has sold out of its coronation packages. “We’ve been very fortunate, coming out of the pandemic, that we had the jubilee last year too. People just wanted to be in London for an event like that.”
There are people like Mooney, mostly from North America and explicitly royal fans, who want to spend a week visiting Windsor Castle and Kensington Palace and having etiquette lessons on the correct way to partake of afternoon tea. Even for specialist operators such as Tours International, however, this market is comparatively tiny, says Bennett. “Oh yes, it’s not huge. It’s a coachload.”
So how significant will the event be on a broader scale? Visit Britain, the national tourist authority, points to an estimated £1.2bn economic boost from the jubilee weekend, though Patricia Yates, the organisation’s CEO, says most of that came from domestic visitors. (For comparison, government modelling would estimate the cost to the economy of an extra day’s bank holiday at £1.36bn, it was reported last year.)
But it is not only about the weekend itself, argues Yates. “We know that our history and heritage is a real draw for visitors from overseas, and it will look amazing on television – we just know that, don’t we? So the drive for us is using that as almost a showpiece in international markets, to encourage people to come this summer.”
She is right that Britain’s heritage and history is a key factor in its huge £131bn tourist industry, and is spoken of around the globe as the aspect most associated with the UK. But heritage is not the same as royalty, and when pressed for figures for the value of the royals, Yates sidesteps.
“We are really careful not to put a number on the value of having a royal family,” she says. “But … does having a living monarchy make a difference? Well, of course it does, in that you have the ceremonials and the constant pattern of family life, with weddings and christenings and death and celebrations.”
Visit Britain has attached a number before. A previous head of the organisation claimed that the queen generated “well over £500m a year directly and indirectly from overseas tourists”, arguing before the wedding of Prince William to Kate Middleton that the event would boost the sum further.
The problem is that neither of those assertions stands up to scrutiny. Numerical claims about the value of the monarchy frequently rely on creative interpretation of visitor numbers to sites with any royal connection, however tangential, says Graham Smith, of Republic, which campaigns to abolish the monarchy.
“If you look at the Tower of London, where the royals haven’t lived for hundreds of years, it’s far, far more popular than Buckingham Palace,” says Smith. (Almost three million people visited the Tower in 2019, compared to 500,000 at the palace, although it is not open year round.). “So it’s clearly not the living history that people are interested in, it’s the history – and history never goes away. There just isn’t any evidence to suggest that people would not visit if [the royals] were not there.”
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Smith says large-scale events such as the coronation may actually depress visitor numbers, as VisitBritain has acknowledged several royal weddings did in the past. An in-depth Harvard University analysis in 2016 concluded that hosts of so-called “mega events” routinely “vastly overstate” their economic benefits, and in terms of tourism any positive effect was very short-lived.
Croft, from Inbound, says that while “most countries around the world would kill to have a brand like the UK”, the association with history “does have its downside as well, which is that people don’t have a sense of urgency. Because you’re based around history and heritage, you don’t have to come to the UK in 2023, because the history and heritage will still be here in 2024 … so often they say ‘yeah, well, I’ll go next year, and this year I’ll go to Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos’.”
That said, Bernard Donoghue, the director of the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, says “all destinations around the world are recovering after the most traumatic period that they’ve ever experienced, so they are looking for that little bit of differentiation to put themselves at the front of people’s minds”.
What that means for British attractions is a flurry of activity among sites across the country that may have only the loosest connection to the coronation, he says. “A lot of my members are going into their attics, going into their collections, and seeing how they can tell the story of their place in a way that is connected to coronations and royalty. In the nicest possible way, they’re all jumping on a golden bandwagon.”
That might suggest that a coronation tide floats all boats; alternatively one could argue that there is no need for any connection to present-day royalty to benefit from nostalgia tourism.
That is the experience of Tours International, which, for all the interest in its coronation-themed tours, sees royalty as just one theme appealing to its key North America market. Tours themed around Celtic Christianity are equally “huge”; so are literary figures such as Shakespeare and the Brontës, says Bennett. “You’ve got the royal family, you’ve got the filming locations – be it Downton Abbey, The Crown – you’ve got the castles and the stately homes.”
As for its other major market of French and German visitors – “they will avoid London at all costs” over coronation weekend, she says.