BANGKOK, 31 May 201: Asia Pacific destinations collectively received almost 700 million international visitor arrivals in 2018 according to PATA’s annual Tourism Monitor 2019 Early Edition.
Arrivals out of Asia have been generating more than 60% of total trips into and across Asia Pacific for numerous years, with that figure now oscillating between 63% and 64% over the last three years to 2018, the Pacific Asia Travel Association report noted.
Northeast Asia fuels the current momentum, with almost three-quarters of arrivals out of Asia into Asia Pacific in 2018, originating from within that sub-region.
PATA’s study indicated that the proportion has remained relatively
steady since 2014, deviating by a little over 1.4 percentage points from peak
to trough, over that period. Southeast Asia also generates a significant volume
of arrivals into Asia Pacific destinations each year, adding to the dominance
of East Asia, which supplied almost 90% of the visitor arrivals into and across
Asia Pacific in 2018.
“It is obvious also, that intra-regional travel within Asia Pacific has
remained strong over the past five years, with 82.5% of arrivals in 2018 coming
from origin markets within Asia Pacific itself.”
At the origin market level, given the strength of Asia flows across Asia Pacific, it is perhaps not surprising to see China and Hong Kong SAR leading the top five list of origin markets by the volume of arrivals they each generated into Asia Pacific in 2018.
It needs to be remembered however that these are visitor flows, not tourists, so by definition they include day-trippers in these counts. This is particularly relevant for some of the cross-border flows between each of Mainland China, Hong Kong SAR and Macao, China. The impact of these day-trippers can not only be significant, but they are also growing in number each year, and for those reasons, must be taken into account.
The flows out of North America are also significant, however, Northeast Asia clearly dominates that particular metric in 2018.
A similar picture is also apparent for the strongest increases in the absolute volume of IVAs generated by individual source markets between 2017 and 2018, with China and Hong Kong SAR once again heading the rankings.
While Northeast Asia dominates that particular list, the Americas appears twice, although with Mexico replacing Canada. These top five origin markets together delivered close to 28.2 million additional IVAs into Asia Pacific destinations in 2018 and accounted for more than 55% of the net increase in arrivals between 2017 and 2018.
