Being up on last year is no longer the same as doing well

Across attractions with comparable year-on-year performance, around half were ahead of last summer and only around a third were down. Time to celebrate? Sadly not, as that sounds fairly healthy, until you look at the targets. More than half were behind their own footfall targets.

Separately, we repeatedly heard the same commercial tension in our trading updates and conversations with attractions. Ahead on footfall but behind on revenue, double-digit year-on-year growth that still wasn’t enough to hit budget, and organisations broadly level with Summer 2025 but significantly behind what they had planned. If you grew by 5% but your board approved a budget assuming 12%, you've simultaneously had a decent summer and a disappointing one. Both things can be true, even if they make for a fairly confusing management meeting.

It raises a wider question about how we set targets. Taking last year's visitor number, adding 5%/10%/15 %, and calling it a target is starting to look less like forecasting and more like blind optimism with a spreadsheet. It is also important not to confuse missing target with marketing failure. Across 50+ attractions in July and August, our paid campaigns generated just over £12 million in attributed ticket revenue from around £609,000 of media spend: a return approaching 20 to 1. The marketing can be working even when the summer isn’t. Advertising can capture available demand efficiently, but it cannot manufacture unlimited amounts of it. If people don't fancy spending six hours outside at 31°C, another £500 on TikTok probably isn't changing their mind that afternoon. The answer isn't to disappear, though. In a market where people are deciding later, consistent visibility matters more, not less. You need to be there when the weather changes, the beach loses its appeal and somebody finally decides, right, what are we doing tomorrow?

I get it, I do speak about weather an awful lot. But writing about summer performance without mentioning it is a bit like assessing a beach without mentioning the tide coming in. Weather was comfortably the biggest influence on performance, with roughly 70% where we have detailed insight identifying it as the dominant factor. But one of the more interesting lessons from 2026 is how meaningless the phrase good weather has become. Sunshine helped plenty of outdoor attractions. Consistent dry conditions gave visitors confidence to plan. Elsewhere, exactly the same weather was a disaster.

One attraction identified around 22–23°C as close to its sweet spot, with performance dropping noticeably above it. Family attractions reported that, unsurprisingly, parents with younger children simply didn't want to spend an entire day outside during the hottest periods.

Indoor attractions struggled too, either because everyone went to the beach or because a poorly ventilated building wasn't quite the cool sanctuary the marketing team might have wanted it to be. At one outdoor attraction, one of the strongest trading days came when it finally rained. So perhaps we can retire the generalisation that sunshine is good for outdoor attractions and rain is good for indoor ones. Thirty degrees at an aquarium is different to thirty degrees in woodland. Thirty degrees at a heritage attraction visited mainly by adults is different to thirty degrees somewhere expecting parents to entertain a three-year-old until 4pm. What increasingly matters is climate comfort. Shade, water, seating, ventilation, earlier or later opening and the ability to shorten or reshape a visit may sound like operational issues. Increasingly, they're commercial ones.

If we'd written this at the end of July, it would have been a considerably gloomier article, but then August happened. Across the attractions where we can track peak dates, 90% recorded their busiest day during August. Suddenly we were hearing about strong weeks, record days, improving bookings and attractions clawing back gaps that had opened earlier in the summer. One major family attraction described it as “pent-up demand”. The first half had simply been too hot for much of its core audience. When conditions improved, families came back in huge numbers. And when they came, they spent.

Visitor attractions increasingly have a volatility problem as much as a volume problem. People research, check prices, check the weather, they look again, and eventually, usually later than any Marketing Manager would prefer, they book. This was exactly the pattern I exhibited myself across the August bank holiday weekend. We've watched booking windows shorten across almost every holiday period we've analysed over the last two years, and summer took that behaviour a step further. Visitors increasingly see committing three weeks in advance as your problem rather than theirs. And unless you’re giving them a darn good reason to book ahead of turning up on the day (big savings, or a chance of you selling), why would they?

Thankfully the Government's Summer Savings was announced in January, and the sector had loads of time to plan for it… Oh wait… Well, the initiative gave us a useful opportunity to look at discounting across a large number of attractions at broadly the same time. Many have argued that the general public didn’t really know what the “summer savings” campaign was, and a last-minute government announcement didn’t really help. From our data, it is difficult to argue that it transformed the market. Among attractions with specific feedback, only a very very small proportion reported a noticeable positive effect. More than half of those taking part couldn't identify any meaningful difference at all.

That doesn't mean price doesn't matter. Obviously it does. Deeper promotions moved demand in some places, but there is a growing difference between being cheaper and feeling better value.

Some of this summer's strongest products weren't straightforward discounts. Summer passes performed extremely well. An afternoon saver ticket produced exceptional numbers. Memberships allowed families to make shorter visits during the heat. Simplified walk-up pricing helped spontaneous bookers without financially punishing them for deciding late.

Then there were attractions that gave people a genuinely new reason to come: exhibitions, galleries, living history, character weekends, evening experiences, wildlife stories, anniversaries and themed areas. One attraction went from a difficult July into a strong August through a combination of new gallery space, a temporary exhibition, anniversary activity and a major topical moment. Catering finished 21% ahead of last year and retail 9% up.

A discount gives somebody a reason to buy more cheaply; programming gives somebody a reason to visit now. Those are not the same thing. And marketing is very good at amplifying a compelling reason to visit, it has a much harder job inventing one.

Your competition isn't necessarily another attraction; on a sunny day it might be the park, the beach, a walk around town followed by a homemade sandwich.

One organisation researching people who hadn't visited found exactly that. Visitors were still coming into their city, but increasingly choosing informal experiences rather than another paid attraction. Elsewhere, huge city events created enormous footfall without producing the spillover attractions nearby had expected. A busy destination does not automatically mean a busy attraction. We are increasingly competing with free. That is why value matters more than price. If a family is choosing between an £80 attraction visit and a free afternoon at the beach, taking £8 off the ticket may not fundamentally change the decision. Giving them an experience the kids have been talking about for three weeks might.

Mixed, obviously. But mixed is one of those wonderfully useless words that manages to be completely accurate while explaining almost nothing. The more interesting conclusion is that people still want days out; they are just far more selective about when they take them. We know people haven't stopped wanting days out. There were record days, strong secondary spend, excellent marketing returns and attractions comfortably ahead of last year. But visitors are waiting for more things to line up. The weather needs to feel right. The price needs to feel justified. The experience needs to beat the alternatives. And when those things come together, demand can move very quickly indeed.

None of this makes next year's budget any easier. If anything, taking last year's attendance, adding a growth percentage and spreading it neatly across the calendar looks like the wrong play. But there is something reassuring underneath all the volatility, the visitor is still there. The challenge is giving people a strong enough reason to choose your day out, at this price, in this weather, this weekend.

This article only scratches the surface. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be going much deeper into Navigate’s summer data: the numbers behind the headlines, the differences between attraction types, what changed between July and August, where marketing performance held up, where it didn’t, and what all of this might mean for autumn, Christmas and planning for 2027.

We’re hosting a webinar on 16 September to unpack the biggest trends from Summer 2026, what they tell us about visitor behaviour, and what they could mean for attractions planning for the months ahead. You can register for the wider sector webinar here.

If you’re currently working with us at Navigate, you can also join us a week earlier for an exclusive session on the 9th. We’ll share the findings first, alongside a deeper dive into advertising performance, campaign trends and the patterns we’re seeing across the organisations we work with. Register for the Navigate session here.

At Navigate, we spend each holiday period looking across visitor behaviour, attraction performance and millions of pounds of ticket sales to understand what is actually changing in the market. Not because there is one magic benchmark that explains everybody, but because the patterns become useful when you can see enough of the sector at once. Summer 2026 has produced more questions than neat answers. Given how quickly visitor behaviour is moving, that may actually be the most useful insight of all.