Wimbledon will pay out a record £64.2 million to qualifiers this summer. Even getting knocked out in the first round will see a participant collect £66,000. But the players won’t be the only big spenders in south-west London this year. The fans travelling to watch them are a commercially valuable crowd in their own right, and most of them still haven’t decided where their next holiday will be.

We turned to TACTIQ, our consumer travel tracker, to profile them. TACTIQ surveys international travellers rather than the general public; here we’ve isolated those who told us they intend to attend Wimbledon and compared them against other travellers in the same markets.

Regular readers will recognise this as a trend. Tourists who take in sports events on their travels often have deeper pockets than those who do not.

And they are more likely to travel in company too – 65% took their last main trip with a partner and 47% with their children, both above the wider travelling population (59% and 34% respectively).

These travellers also stay longer. 23% expect to stay 8-10 nights, against 18% of others.

They’ll pay for the good stuff

As we touched on earlier, this segment has bigger budgets. A quarter (25%) say they’ll book a luxury, top-tier hotel for their next international trip – more than double the 11% among other travellers – with a further 24% choosing upscale or boutique properties.

Among the big brands, Marriott leads at 22% (against 12%). They also spend once they’re on the move: they are more than twice as likely to always buy luxuries and upgrades (32% vs 14%) and to pay for airport lounge access (also 32% vs 14%). Among UK travellers, 15% spend £5,000 or more on a holiday – twice the 7% seen elsewhere.

More than the tennis

As ever with sports travellers, the event is only part of the appeal. On trips built around watching professional sport, this audience seeks out culture (46% vs 36%), fun experiences such as theme parks (42% vs 27%) and the spectacle around the venues – 34% rate fan zones and special events, against just 19% of other travellers.

This group differs from FIFA World Cup tourists in that respect – these kinds of attractions are relatively less popular among the football fan segment.

A third (33%) want to stay somewhere premium even on a sports trip, double the 17% elsewhere. It helps explain why 30% say they want to come home feeling “inspired and energised” (against 23% of others), and why 13% – twice the rate of other travellers – actively choose destinations for the sporting events on offer.

Where they’ve been – and where they’re going

These are well-travelled tourists. They over-index sharply on some premium and long-haul destinations they’ve already holidayed in: for example, the UAE (18%, against 6% of other travellers), Australia and Switzerland (both 16%) and Saudi Arabia (11%).

Looking ahead, the US, Italy, the UK, Spain and France top their shortlist for the next two to three years, with Japan and the UAE close behind.

Reaching them increasingly means meeting them online. Nearly half (48%) use AI tools such as Claude and Gemini to plan their trips – against 27% of other travellers, making them among the heaviest adopters we track.

The takeaway

The Wimbledon traveller is young, affluent, experience-hungry and ready to spend well beyond the ticket – and a sizeable share are still choosing where to go. Want to know what TACTIQ can reveal about the fans of your sport, or the visitors to your destination? Get in touch.