FOREIGN tourists visiting Worcester and Hereford have been splashing out more cash than ever before.

New figures published by the Office For National Statistics show that overseas visitors spent a million pounds more during 2004 than the year before - £52m compared with £51m.

This was despite the fact that the number of tourists visiting the city fell slightly from 182,000 to 176,000.

Andrea Watkins, Worcester City Council's tourism and marketing manager, said the rise in spending reflected Worcester's high-quality attractions.

She said: "As well as the Cathedral and Royal Worcester, the restaurant scene has improved in recent years. Also, shopping is a more and more a popular pastime and we are a good shopping centre.

"We are not far from Birmingham airport, either."

She added that better-off overseas visitors may have been attracted to the area because of its rural location, while more affluent travellers may also have been drawn by world-famous exports like Royal Worcester Porcelain.

Amanda Savage, of the Royal Worcester Porcelain museum, said its visitors, which came from all over the world, did not necessarily spend a lot of money individually, but more people had visited in 2005, perhaps because of the July 7 London bombings.

She said: "We saw quite an increase, I believe because American tour operators were taking tourists away from London. We got a good mixture of people from Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Japan."

However, another potential tourist attraction, the Elgar Birthplace Museum in Lower Broadheath, near Worcester, missed out on the spending boom.

Museum director Catherine Sloan said: "Probably only five per cent of our visitors are from abroad. I wouldn't say they spent more because a lot of Elgar's fans buy from the internet."

Nationally, the number of foreign visitors rose to 27.7 million in 2004 from 24.7 million, and they spent £13bn, up from £11.7bn.