Foreign arrivals in Asia Pacific break new records: report

Foreign arrivals in Asia Pacific break new records: report

By The Nation

Asia Pacific broke a new record in foreign arrivals in 2017, topping a cumulative count of 636 million visitors to the region, according to a report released today by the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA).
 

Covering 47 destinations across the region with eight in the Americas, 15 in the Pacific and 24 across Asia, the PATA Annual Tourism Monitor 2018 Early Edition reviews foreign arrivals over the past five years in an effort to quantify the changing trends and patterns of international travel across the Asia Pacific region.

The distribution of these arrivals was such that, in terms of the destination regions and sub-regions covered in the report, Asia received the majority of these arrivals in 2017 with a 72-per-cent share, followed by the Americas with 24 per cent and the Pacific with the remaining four percent. A similar distribution was seen for the additional volume of foreign arrivals generated in each region between 2016 and 2017.

Another annual performance marker is the increase in the absolute number of foreign arrivals between 2016 and 2017, and the top five with the highest actual annual volume increases in 2017 were: Turkey (+7.058 million), Japan (+4.763 million), Mexico (+4.218 million), Vietnam (+3.024 million), and Thailand (+2.852 million).

In total, 11 Asia Pacific destinations each welcomed more than one million additional foreign arrivals to their respective destinations between 2016 and 2017. Only four of the 47 destinations reported declines in their inbound foreign arrival numbers, and these ranged from a minor loss of 4,000 arrivals to a much more significant contraction of nearly 3.9 million.

Overall however, the Asia Pacific region received nearly 35 million more foreign arrivals in 2017 than just one year earlier.

Intra-regional travel flows remained very strong for most Asia Pacific regions in 2017, with almost 94 per cent of the foreign arrivals to Asia originating from within Asia itself. For the Americas, the intra-regional proportion of international travel was 78 per cent.

The Pacific went against this trend, with 32 per cent of its foreign arrivals in 2017 originating from within the Pacific region, Fifty-three per cent came from countries or Asian origin. 

In terms of supplier markets to Asia Pacific in 2017, the vast majority of foreign arrivals came from Asia (62 per cent), followed by the Americas (18 per cent) and then Europe (12 per cent). The Pacific supplied a little over two percent of the total arrivals into Asia Pacific last year, followed by Africa with less than one per cent. A significant proportion of arrivals (five per cent) came from origin markets that were unspecified.

Source: http://www.nationmultimedia.com/detail/breakingnews/30345039

 

-- © Copyright The Nation 2018-05-10