Thursday, October 10, 2019

Tourist arrivals increase in Asia-Pacific

Data for foreign arrivals into 46 Asia Pacific destinations confirmed the overall continuation of solid growth in 2018, achieving a 7.3 per cent annual increase compared to 2017 and reaching a new record high of nearly 708 million international visitor arrivals (IVAs).
According to the Annual Travel Monitor 2019 Final Edition (ATM) released by the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) today, over the five years between 2014 and 2018, the 46 Asia Pacific destinations covered in the report have collectively seen their IVAs increase by almost 24 per cent, adding more than 136 million additional arrivals to the collective foreign inbound count in the process.
In percentage increase terms between 2017 and 2018, Asia had the strongest annual increase at 8.7 per cent, followed by the Pacific at four per cent and the Americas at 3.5 per cent, it reads. “By annual increase in the absolute volume of foreign arrivals between 2017 and 2018 however, these positions changed somewhat, with Asia receiving close to 41.6 million additional foreign arrivals, followed by the Americas with a gain of over 5.4 million and the Pacific with just over one million additional foreign arrivals received over that period.”
Within the Americas, North America showed the strongest incremental increase in foreign arrivals between 2017 and 2018, capturing more than 55 per cent of the 5.446 million increase over that period, followed next by Central America.
Across Asia it was Northeast Asia in particular that captured the largest proportion of additional foreign arrivals into the region between 2017 and 2018. While in the Pacific, Polynesia and Oceania dominated that landscape.
At the individual Asia Pacific destination level, destinations with the strongest annual percentage growth rates in 2018 ranked as All told, 24 per cent of the 46 destinations covered in this report had annual growth rates in excess of 10 per cent between 2017 and 2018, while 65 per cent grew by five per cent or more.
Nevertheless, the strong collective performance of Asia Pacific destinations in 2018 appears to be changing into 2019. According to PATA chief executive Dr Mario Hardy, “Preliminary results for early 2019 show a slight softening in the collective annual increase in foreign arrivals into 37 Asia Pacific destinations, reducing to 6.2 per cent year-to-date, year-on-year.”
“Even so, this growth rate has added almost 17 million additional arrivals to the total inbound count during the first periods of 2019 relative to the same period of last year,” he said, adding that the impacts of various geo-political and natural changes appear to be affecting the global travel and tourism sector and we expect some significant changes in the Asia Pacific 2019 picture by the end of the year.
Early 2019 data for foreign arrivals into 37 Asia Pacific destinations shows a general softening of growth relative to the same periods of 2018, dropping from a 7.3 per cent increase in early 2018, to 6.2 per cent in early 2019. Despite this, close to 17 million additional IVAs have been received between early 2018 and early 2019, reaching another record high of almost 288 million arrivals.

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