Travel to Europe Reaches One Billion Tourists This Year!

Europe

One billion tourists will travel to Europe in 2012 according to the World Travel & Tourism Council. It also envisages the fact that one out of every seven people on the planet will participate in world travel this year. The reason for the rise of travel is prosperity in developing countries like China to ensure a perception of a more peaceful world.

The London-based council, whose members include executives of travel companies, compiles global travel data including international airport traffic and visa records. The records confirm that the one billionth tourist will cross the international boundary on December 13th.

"This is an astounding milestone," David Scowsill, president of the council, said. "There is an inexorable growth in the number of people who want to travel around the world."

The inflation-adjusted cost of a plane ticket from New York to London today is about a quarter of what it was in 1960, he said.

Several factors are responsible for the boom in world travel, including prosperity that has lifted tens of millions of people in Asia from poverty into the middle class, whetting their desire to use their new wealth to travel.

The number of people traveling internationally from China, for instance, has jumped from 58 million in 2010 to 72 million this year, Scowsill said.

While the United States and France remain the two largest destinations for world travel, experts say much of the explosive growth in tourism has been to countries such as Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and the Ivory Coast, which were off the world tourism map a decade ago.

The top five destinations in the world are Paris, London, New York, Mediterranean resort Antalya in Turkey, and Singapore, according to the United Nation's World Tourism Organization.