³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

It's either because tourists spend more consoling themselves when it's raining, or because of Oban's growing reputation as the place to go for fine fish dining, the self-proclaimed Seafood Capital of Scotland.

Perhaps it's both that explain why the Argyll town has one of the highest tourist spends-per-day.

While London, as top destination, costs tourists £96 per day, and Edinburgh comes second in number of visits with an average daily spend not much above average at £67, Oban - ranked 47 among British tourist towns - hauls in £90 per tourist day along with its lobster creels.

The catch is that of all the tourist destinations in Scotland, only Aberdeen has an above average number of days spent there - at seven - and that's probably explained by the large amounts of business tourism into the energy capital.

In Oban, Inverness and Fort William, which also appear in the top 50, people tend to stay only three nights.

Why they spend an average 11 nights in Nottingham and nine nights in Sheffield is one for Highland tourist businesses to figure out and learn from.

Brakes slammed on

Such nuggets of more or less useful information can be gleaned from the annual Travel Trends publication from the Office of National Statistics.

Covering the calendar year 2009, its main feature is a staggeringly large drop in Brits going abroad, after decades of fairly steady growth averaging 4% per year.

Leisure travel was bad, but the business travel sector was truly grim.

That shouldn't be a huge surprise. There was a recession on, after all. And finance directors slammed the brakes on overseas travel.

Visits overseas by UK residents were down 15%. That's more than 10m fewer visits than 2008, which saw a slight decline as the downturn began to bite.

Foreign business travel by UK residents was down 23%, while 19% fewer business visits were made to the UK.

Spending by foreigners on British tourism was actually up, despite the recession, while Brits' overseas spend fell sharply, down by 27% in North America.

Bucket and spade

Apart from recession, much of this story can be explained by the weakness of sterling. As the US dollar climbed, it was UK visits to the US that showed one of the sharpest falls.

But there's a problem there. With the eurozone being so important to British tourism, its relative weakening in recent months won't have helped Britain seem so attractively cheap for this year.

Burrow further down into the ONS survey data with your bucket and spade, and you'll find something perhaps a bit surprising about Scotland.

It did rather well amid all this tourism maelstrom. Now it may be that the methodology explains this, as the survey only began to cover Aberdeen airport's international arrivals and departures during last year.

"Experiential" golf

But leaving that aside, Scotland's tourist industry saw gains in both leisure and business tourism.

Spend, according to this survey, was up from £1.24bn to £1.37bn.

While North American spend fell sharply, there was another £100m coming in from our continental neighbours.

Visitor numbers were up from 2.49m to 2.54m, while in England they fell from 27.3m to 25.4m.

While England's business tourism fell from 6.6m visits to 5.2m, Scotland's rose from 382,000 to 425,000.

And while business tourism spend was down nearly £1bn in England, it rose £60m in Scotland.

This wasn't evident from what the industry was saying, with the business and conference market finding the recession particularly hard-going.

But then, of course, these figures don't include the UK element of domestic business travel.

At the high end of tourism, I learn from the Huffington Post that Scotland scores highly among well-off, post-recession Americans for exclusive experiences such as the Royal Scotsman train, taking only 36 passengers.

Or it scores as "experiential" if, for instance, you visit to play golf.

Foreign fans

And on the sports front, VisitBritain tells us this morning that foreign visitors wanting to participate in sport, or watching it, account for 14% of the industry, and 10% of visitors.

Or at least, they did in 2008. As players, they spent £1.3bn, and they spent nearly as much watching it.

Football was the main draw for spectators, more than quarter of a million of them Irish. That was followed by horse-racing.

Golf scored big for participation, with the tourism promotion agency saying 94,000 Americans came to Britain to tee off, along with 66,000 Germans, 44,000 French, 30,000 Spanish and 28,000 Irish.

In the process, it's reckoned sports tourists spent an average £900 per trip, whereas the average non-sporty type typically spends £500.

Many such golfers will be tuned into St Andrews and the Open this week, making it a showcase for Scotland's tourism product.

The weather on the Fife coast is looking dismal, so we'd better land some quality langoustine.