Asia Pacific leads the way with 550m visitors

Asia Pacific leads the way with 550m visitors
By Hannah Edensor


International visitor arrivals into the Asia Pacific catapulted to over 550 million throughout last year.

Taking the numbers up by around 6%, these new figures come out of the just released PATA Annual Tourism Monitor 2015 (Early Edition), according to eTN.

Out of the massive number of visitors to the region, 73% of the arrivals were captured by Asia, followed by the Americas with a 23% share and the Pacific with the last 4%.

Of the 44 Asia Pacific destinations covered in the report, two-thirds had foreign inbound volumes in excess of one million for the year, with 12 of those exceeding 10 million, according to eTN.

The podium places saw no change in 2015, however, with the top five destinations remaining as China with gold, USA with silver, Hong Kong SAR in third place, and subsequently Turkey and Macau SAR.

By annual percentage growth there were some extremely strong performances, with 10 of the destinations reporting increases in the double-digit range.

Palau, Bhutan, Japan, Myanmar and Chinese Taipei headed the list with growth, according to eTN, ranging from 34% (Palau) to 23.6% (Chinese Taipei).

South Asia saw the top inbound source markets as China, India and the UK, while over in Southeast Asia, Singapore, China and Indonesia dominated the volume of foreign inbound arrivals.

PATA’s CEO Mario Hardy said the flow of visitors is changing shape with each new year, according to eTN.

“Reviewing the growth patterns and distribution of visitor arrivals into Asia Pacific over a past five-year period gives us a solid perspective on how these flows are becoming more fluid, shifting and moving between both origin and destination markets,“ he said.

“In that sense, this report provides a balance between PATA’s quarterly summation of origin-destination pairs and at the other extreme, the best predictions of how they are expected to play out over the future five-year period. It is undoubtedly an essential tool in placing the possible future firmly in the context of what has already occurred.”

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