Depending on the venue, this impact may be an increase or decrease in visitation – for example, where school group bookings contribute significantly during term, or where the venue’s target market is geared more towards young families getting out and about on non school days. However, overall we find that for both cultural and commercial venues, visitation generally increases over the school holidays. 

On average, visitor attractions experience a 27% increase in daily visitation across school holidays (including weekends before, during and after the term break). When we look specifically at weekdays during the holidays over the course of the year, the impact is noticeably more in cultural institutions (40%) than commercial attractions (31%).

This influence continues even on the weekends during school holidays, though with a more muted influence. Comparing visitation weekends that occur immediately after or before a school holiday with visitation on weekends at other times during the year, visitation is 8% higher for cultural institutions and 7% higher for commercial attractions. These numbers also change across the seasons. 

When predicting visitation, the impact of school holidays on visitor behavior can be seen in how important this feature is to our machine learning model – ranking 11th in importance overall. Overall, school holidays rank as more important than forecast factors such as public holidays, seasonality and events on at the venue but less so than factors such as the current COVID severity level, opening hours and day of the week.