Scotch tourism has become big business. The Scotch Whisky Association has reported that in 2024 Scotch distilleries attracted 2.7 million visits, putting whisky among Scotland’s largest draws for tourists. That 2.7 million figure exceeds the previous pre-pandemic high of 2.61 million visits in 2019 and is around 35% higher than the 2 million visits recorded in 2022. According to Visit Scotland, in 2024 more than a quarter of long-haul tourists visited a whisky or gin distillery or a brewery during their trip. Today the growth of Scotch tourism is outpacing the category itself.

The result is that something of an arms race is in full swing, with brands clamouring to open the next modern take on the brand home that connects with Scotch’s more inclusive, and less dusty, 21st-century vision.

Since 2020, Brora has launched its visitor experience, as has Rosebank in Falkirk. Caol Ila, Ardbeg and Port Ellen have all launched programmes on Islay. Gordon & McPhail opened a distillery with a visitor centre in the Cairngorms National Park. Loch Lomond opened a brand home in 2025, a year after The Macallan opened Time Spirit with El Celler de Can Roca, the Roca brothers’ first dining concept outside Spain, at The Macallan Estate.

But no brand has been more active in launching homes and whisky experiences than Diageo’s Johnnie Walker. Since the pandemic, the world’s bestselling Scotch has opened a Lowland, Highland and Speyside brand home alongside a blending experience in Edinburgh.

The eight-floor Johnnie Walker Experience at Princess Street has left the biggest impression. Opening in Edinburgh’s city centre in September 2021, by the end of 2023 it had welcomed more than a million visitors. The centre is the flagship of a £185m investment that Diageo has made into Scotland-wide tourism experiences.

Speaking to Drinks International, a spokesperson for the group said: “Our portfolio includes 13 brand homes and 30 distilleries across Scotland for visitors (regular tourists and private clients alike) to immerse themselves in the history and stories of our brands.

“We host more than 1 million visitors annually… from opening towards the end of 2021 to date, the Johnnie Walker Experience has had over 1.6 million visitors. We’ve welcomed guests from over 140 countries and nearly 50% of visitors are women with an average age of 40, proving there is a desire from consumers to push against preconceptions and discover more.”

The Princes Street whisky experience has become the brand home equivalent of what Johnnie Walker is for the Scotch category. Nothing else competes in terms of volume or category recruitment. But while the volume end of Scotch tourism is burgeoning, so too are its upper limits.

Increasingly producers of luxury Scotch are introducing more bespoke, higher-value experiences. These range from access to rare casks, blending sessions or warehouse tastings to boundary-pushing fine-dining experiences – the Two Michelin-starred Glenturret Lalique Restaurant at The Glenturret Distillery in Perthshire is one of Scotland’s two restaurants to be awarded the accolade.

The result has been a lot more money spent. In 2022, the SWA reported that visitors spent more than £85m at Scotch whisky sites, up 90% since 2010.

Major renovation

The latest to add to the roster of luxury whisky tourism experiences is The Dalmore. After a major renovation that has seen the Highland distillery double its production capacity, the Whyte & Mackay flagship single malt opened a visitor experience that gives guests private access to the distillery and a concierge-led event tailored to whatever they want to explore while there. The experience opened to the public on 27 April and before a single guest had passed through the distillery gates it was already booked through to November.

“Because each visit has been private, it’s meant that we have been able to push the tailored concept to places where we initially started thinking about it,” says Ludo Ducrocq, Whyte & Mackay global head of ambassadors and brand homes.

“There have been requests for focusing on different aspects of the storytelling. Some people have been more interested in the intricacies of whisky making, others have been more interested in history. Others have been more interested in the broad category as well, not just necessarily the Dalmore, but Scotch. When time is more limited, it’s difficult to go in those kinds of tangents.

“We’ve had people asking if they can taste whiskies from their birth year. We’ve had a request from someone who is buying an experience for her whisky enthusiast husband, but she said to us that she’s not really a whisky drinker, she’s more interested in champagne. If she wants to drink champagne while her husband is tasting the whiskies, then that’s something that we can do as well.

“We’re just scratching the surface, because we’ve only been open for a few weeks, so it’ll be interesting to see the sort of requests that we get in the future.”

Catering a bespoke experience to an individual group booking is a long way from the school trip-style walking tours of the distillery experiences of yesteryear, but it reflects a change in how Scotch, and particularly single malt, has changed its identity.

“I joined the industry in 2000. Back then, single malt whisky was in a very different place compared to where it is today,” says Ducrocq. “It was the beginning of whisky shows and the start of ambassadors travelling and talking about the category – it was about recruitment into the category in general, it was a numbers game.

“Because there were fewer visitor centres, you had fewer choices as a tourist in Scotland, so a lot of the experiences were free. At the distillery I started at, tours were free and it was a marketing cost for the business. We got loads of people through the door, lots of people tasting the whisky, talking about the brand, and that worked well.

“As brands, and single malt in general, continued to grow, it became increasingly sophisticated. More distilleries opened their doors to the public. New distilleries started being built with not just production in mind, but also hospitality at their heart. What’s also happened is that the single malt category has become more segmented. In the early days, single malt was all premium relative to blended whisky. Now, within single malt, there are different levels with The Dalmore at the top. I think what we’re doing with our visitor experience is the logical next step.”

The visitor experience and distillery renovation at The Dalmore was a collaboration between the brand and a number of creatives including Threesixty Architecture, a Glasgow-based architecture firm that has designed a number of distilleries across Scotland.

“Narrative has always been important to the visitor,” says architect and director Stefano Faiella who headed up The Dalmore project. “From the client point of view, too many times they haven’t quite realised what the secret sauce they already had was.

“With whisky a lot of these projects start in a very process-driven environment, and most of these projects in the past few years bluntly have come from a place of we need to double our capacity, so in the meantime we might as well tidy up our narrative and visitor experience. With something like The Dalmore, it seemed like the right people had written the brief in terms of what the brand home should be about.”

Alongside The Dalmore Distillery, the firm has also designed the Uisge Beatha Distillery, Inverness Distillery and the Port of Leith Distillery in Edinburgh, Scotland’s first vertical distillery.

“The beautiful thing about Port of Leith and The Dalmore is that they sit at two opposite ends of the Scotch whisky spectrum,” says Faiella. “One is for a mass audience, the other far more particular. From our perspective, the contrast between the two is essential because both spaces have to reflect those two different whisky brands.

“We’re always trying to understand what the unique opportunities are that any site might offer. We bandy the word ‘authenticity’ about a lot in this environment and in Scotch it often gets reattached to the same kinds of things – the water, the location, a 200-year-old process that has been slightly romanticised. To accept that there is a really interesting and powerful past, but to shift the narrative forward is really interesting.

“The biggest failure if we’re going to have a designer going to a meeting is if the client asks us to sex it up. It’s our job to push the imagination and find new ways to resonate with the audience.”

Scotch tourism has become a mirror for the category’s wider evolution. At one end it is broadening the funnel, recruiting younger, more diverse and more international consumers into whisky. At the other, it is stretching the ceiling of what a distillery visit can be. But while spirits sales proceed to limp along through the post-pandemic landscape, the tourism arm of the Scotch industry isn’t suffering the same fate.