The World Bank released global tourism numbers on Monday and the outlook is good.
Countries with low tourism numbers are getting bigger while the big players are holding their own. Basically: People are travelling more.
Go figure, right?
Kyrgyzstan has been the big winner of the past two decades. Since 1995, that country’s tourist population has gone up 86.5 per cent, topping world tourist growth.
It was those developping countries which are the big stories across the world tourism market. Facing similarly striking double-digit tourist growth, Armenia, Angola, Georgia, Laos and Sudan all posted growth greater than 18%.
Cape Verde, Bhutan, Cambodia and Albania rounded out the top ten fastest growing tourism markets.
Canadian tourism actually fell in the same period, meeting only 94.5 per cent of its 1995 numbers in 2011. Similarly, tourism hotspots like the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands all noticed drops in overall tourist numbers.
Take a look at how the change in tourism played out around the world in our interactive map (darker colours are fastest risers, bright green are the top countries for tourist growth):
You can check out the data for yourself at the World Bank’s website.
The data for tourist numbers is defined as “the number of tourists who travel to a country other than that in which they have their usual residence, but outside their usual environment, for a period not exceeding 12 months and whose main purpose in visiting is other than an activity remunerated from within the country visited.”
The organization also cautions against the kind of country-to-country comparisons in this article.
“The data on inbound tourists refer to the number of arrivals, not to the number of people traveling. Thus a person who makes several trips to a country during a given period is counted each time as a new arrival.”
See the raw number of arrivals in each country here:
