International Arrivals into Asia Pacific Continue Strong Growth Momentum Through Early 2015

International arrivals into the Asia Pacific region continued the strong growth momentum of previous years with a gain of 5.4% during the first half-year of 2015, resulting in close to 12.5 million additional arrivals year-on-year. This continues the full year growth of 6.1% during calendar year 2014, which culminated in a total foreign inbound volume of more than 550 million.

These are some of the top-level findings contained within the Annual Tourism Monitor 2015 Final Edition released today by the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA). Following the release of the Early Edition in May this year, the Final Editionincludes a number of other measures of travel activity and profiles including length of stay, expenditure and several other useful quantitative metrics.

Early indicators of travel flows for calendar year 2015 (year-to-date) are also provided for 39 Asia Pacific destinations as an early warning mechanism for identifying major shifts and movements in key source and destination markets.

Highlights of the Annual Tourism Monitor 2015 Final Edition include:

• International Visitors arrivals to the Asia Pacific region – as defined by the 45 destinations covered in this report – have collectively shown significant growth over the last five years rising from almost 455 million in 2010 to over 552 million in 2014.
• Asia continued its dominance in 2014, capturing more than 410 million foreign arrivals – a relative share of more than 74% – led by Northeast Asia with a share of 47% of total international arrivals into Asia Pacific.
• China, Hong Kong SAR and the USA were the top three generating markets for all international arrivals within the Asia Pacific region in 2014, although there were significant deviations in that grouping from sub-region to sub-region.
• For early 2015, the 39 destinations in the Asia Pacific region with arrivals data for early 2015 show a collective gain of 5.4% year on year, compared to growth of five percent for the same destinations and periods of 2014.
• The Americas region is showing the strongest 2015 period growth (6.8%) year on year, followed by the Pacific (6.3%) and then Asia (5.0%).
• Early 2015 indictors for the key source market show that Thailand, Hong Kong SAR and Japan captured more than 4.1 million additional arrivals from China, period over period in 2015.
• The impact of the contraction in the Russian outbound market is also considered in light of destinations across the Asia Pacific region in early 2015, with Thailand, Turkey and China being particularly negatively affected.

“Understanding the immediate impacts of changes in the foreign inbound markets allows us to contain the negative consequences and boost the positive. This Final Edition of the 2015 PATA Annual Tourism Monitor therefore provides an important first step in quantifying these changes and allowing us to make resource deployment decisions based on those quantification metrics,” said PATA CEO Mario Hardy. “Our publications along with PATAmPOWER are valuable tools for those planning and making important decisions in allocating their resources for the future.”