SINGAPORE, 23 June 2026: Chameleon Strategies and CrescentRating, both UN Tourism Affiliate Members, launched the Asia Pacific Outbound Traveler Handbook 2026, a market-by-market intelligence resource covering 26 Asian outbound source markets.
The report was unveiled at the Halal In Travel Global Summit in Singapore, and a condensed version of the handbook is available for free download at AsiaTravelTrends.com. In contrast, the full, comprehensive version is available at 66% discount for a limited time, along with individual market reports.
The publication is written for destination marketers, national tourism organisations, airlines, tour operators, and travel trade professionals who need practical, source-specific intelligence on how Asian consumer travel behaviour is changing and what that change means for their planning decisions.
The launch comes at a moment of significant pressure on Asian outbound travel. Airspace disruptions across the Middle East in 2025 and early 2026 strained routing on corridors that carry some of the largest volumes of outbound Asian passenger traffic.
Against that backdrop, the report’s 26 market chapters are designed to give practitioners the specific, source-market-level understanding they need to plan with greater precision, not just track aggregate trends.
“Tourism posted a post-pandemic record in 2025. In the same season, the corridors, costs, and politics that produced that record were being rewritten underneath it, said Chameleon Strategies CEO and Co-Editor, Asia Pacific Outbound Traveler Report 2026, Dr Jens Thraenhart.
“I call the space between those two realities the Next Tourism Order. In that world, generic aspirational travel fills hotels in good years. Passion-tourism fills them in on the difficult ones. The question destinations should be asking is not how many travellers are coming, but what they are genuinely coming for. The Asia Pacific Outbound Traveler Handbook 2026 is the demand-side guide to that question, written for the destination leaders, who understand that the operators who get this right now will be the ones still standing when conditions shift.”
The report covers 26 source markets: Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, UAE, and Taiwan. Each chapter is structured around a single core argument about what a given market is actually doing and why destinations consistently misread it.
The Saudi Arabia chapter, written by Dr Thraenhart and drawing on his experience in the Kingdom and his recent time as an advisor at the Saudi Tourism Authority, makes the case that Saudi outbound represents one of the most consistently underestimated high-yield opportunities in global tourism. Saudi travellers stay an average of 19 nights internationally and have shifted decisively from goods-led to experience-led travel over the past five years. The same motivational shift observed in Chinese outbound travel a decade ago is now building in the Gulf.
The shared values, faith-based needs, and core behaviours of Muslim travellers form an incredibly powerful, unifying bond across borders. This collective identity is the absolute foundation of Muslim-friendly travel. However, we must remember that these travellers are not a monolith. While united by deep universal values, a Muslim traveller from Indonesia still possesses distinct cultural nuances compared to those of a traveller from Saudi Arabia or Kazakhstan. To succeed, destinations must treat these shared Muslim values as their non-negotiable bedrock, while layering source-market-specific execution on top. The Asia Pacific Outbound Traveler Handbook 2026 bridges this gap,” explained CrescentRating CEO and Co-Editor, Asia Pacific Outbound Traveler Report 2026, Fazal Bahardeen.
The Asia Pacific Outbound Traveller Report 2026 is an initiative by PATA and the UN Tourism Affiliate Members, Chameleon Strategies and CrescentRating. Free registration at AsiaTravelTrends.com enables digital downloads of the handbooks and specific source-market reports.
(Source: Chameleon Strategies and CrescentRating)
