Rugby World Cup to bring £20m benefit to Newcastle

Newcastle's tourism and transport industry could be more than £20m better off thanks to the Rugby World Cup.

As a result of the three games played at St James' Park, local hotels, restaurants and bars, will earn £20,749,000 from incoming visitors.

The research was carried out by search engine GoEuro.co.uk with under a month to go until the 2015 Rugby World Cup commences.

It predicts the tournament will be the biggest generator of tourism since the 2012 London Olympics.

The research focused on transport, accommodation and miscellaneous costs and did not take the cost of tickets into account.

The methodology behind it involved making an average of tourist expenditure by nationality of visitors (Visit Britain and UNWTO statistics) along with GoEuro's Price Indexes.