Scotch whisky distilleries recorded 2.7 million visits in 2024. That is a new all-time record, beating the pre-pandemic peak of 2.61 million set in 2019. More than 60% of those visitors came from overseas, up from just under half in 2022. Taken together, distillery visitor centres are now Scotland's most visited attraction.
It sounds like a loyalty story. In fact it is a footfall story, and the difference turns out to be the interesting part.
Visits are not visitors
A whisky tourist doing the Speyside trail and stopping at five distilleries in a week registers as five visits. The real number of individual people is lower than 2.7 million, and nobody knows by how much. The count cannot say which of them has ever been before either.
Here is the part that surprised us when we went looking. The Scotch Whisky Association's tourism survey records footfall, spend and where visitors come from. It does not record whether anyone is on a first visit or a return visit. No industry body publishes that breakdown. No academic study fills the gap either.
None of this means distilleries are blind. Anyone who runs a visitor centre knows the regulars by face, and club lists and mailing lists hold pieces of the answer. That knowledge is real. It is also local, held in people's heads and hard to add up across a whole industry. Regional tourism surveys in Scotland do measure repeat visits, so the metric is perfectly possible. It just is not measured for distilleries, and the faces a visitor centre team knows are, almost by definition, the visitors who live close enough to come back.
The nearest comparable numbers come from elsewhere. Visit Napa Valley's 2025 visitor study reports that its repeat wine tourists have visited an average of 5.9 times, and describes them as the segment with the highest lifetime value at the lowest cost to reach. Silicon Valley Bank's annual wine industry report puts wine club sales at around 24% of the average American winery's revenue, with tasting rooms and clubs together now accounting for more than half of it. Those are wine figures, not Scotch figures. But they show what a measured relationship looks like. Nobody has built the Scotch version yet.
What a visit actually gives people
Read any first-person account of a distillery visit and the same things come up. The smell of the dunnage warehouse, which visitors routinely describe as overwhelming. Tasting straight from the cask. Watching the coopers work. And above all, the people. Tasting whisky with the people who make it is the thing nobody forgets.
That hour is the most powerful brand moment the industry has. Then the visitor buys a bottle, walks out through the gift shop, flies home to Osaka or Austin, and more often than not the relationship goes quiet. With more than 60% of visitors coming from abroad, for most of them that visit was probably the only one they will ever make.
The bottle travels home. The relationship too often does not. Unless something else travels home with it.
The thing in their pocket
A mobile phone goes home in every visitor's pocket. That is why we think a distillery's app is not a gadget or a sales channel. It is the one piece of the distillery a visitor can carry out of the gate.
We should be honest about what an app cannot do. It cannot carry the warehouse smell. It cannot pour a dram from the cask. Anyone who tells you a screen replaces a visit is selling you something you don't want to buy.
What it can carry is the people and the story. The Borders Distillery launched its 1837 cask transparency platform this year so cask owners are told when their cask is filled, moved, sampled or re-racked. Their chief operating officer put the reason plainly, saying owners should feel "part of the journey, not just observers". A short video from the still house, a message from a named distiller, a live tasting with a sample sent ahead. These are the parts of the visit that travel.
Other membership businesses proved this years ago. Soho House built a whole membership tier, Cities Without Houses, for members with no physical House to visit, held together by an app. Peloton built one of the most loyal audiences in consumer fitness on instructors talking into a camera as if to one person. The pattern is the same every time. The technology is not the relationship. It carries the relationship.
The number nobody has
There is one more thing an app quietly does. Because the industry measures visits rather than identifiable visitors, no distillery can put a firm number on its own return rate, however well its team knows the familiar faces in the gift shop. An app with member accounts joins the pieces up. The distillery sees who came, who came back and who stayed connected from the other side of the world, including all the people no one at the visitor centre could be expected to recognise.
We marked our own homework
Our own app work so far has been in the security industry. When we decided to bring what we had learned home to Scotland's own industries, whisky was the obvious place to start, and we have spent this year designing what a distillery app should be. This research changed that design three times before it changed anything else.
The first change was measurement. Member accounts sat underneath everything we had planned, and we had never said the obvious thing out loud: this is how a distillery finally learns its own return rate. Who came, who came back, who stayed connected from abroad. A by-product turned out to be the point.
The second was people. The evidence, from Peloton's instructors to the Borders' cask updates, is that named humans carry the relationship, not features. Nothing in our plans committed a distillery's own staff to the screen. A short film from the still house, a note from a named distiller when a season turns. They do now.
The third was the handover. Nothing in the design deliberately turned a person standing in the visitor centre into a named account before they reached the car park. A code at the end of a tour, tied to something worth having on the spot, their own tasting notes or a photo from the warehouse, is the moment footfall becomes a visitor. It is the least glamorous feature on the list and probably the most important.
Our blog is called Just a Tool because that is what all of this is. The app is not the point. The relationship is the point. The app is simply the tool that keeps a relationship alive with someone who fell for your whisky in a warehouse on a wet Tuesday and may never stand in it again.
The industry counted 2.7 million visits in 2024. The interesting number is the one nobody counted.