Asia continued to dominate the supply of international visitor arrival numbers (IVAs) into Asia-Pacific in 2018, generating close to 63% of the 696.5 million IVAs into the region, according to data from the Annual Travel Monitor 2019 Final Edition released by PATA.
In percentage growth terms between 2017 and 2018, Africa outbound into Asia-Pacific had the strongest annual increase at over 13% year-on-year, followed by Europe at almost 11% and then Asia at 7.3%. The nondescript ‘Others’ category increased by 7.5% in 2018, year-on-year.
By annual increase in the absolute volume of foreign arrivals over that same period, these positions changed somewhat, with Asia generating close to 30.3 million additional foreign arrivals, followed by Europe with more than 8.5 million and then the Americas with just over 5.9 million.
Africa generated a volume increase of just under half-a-million IVAs.
Out of Africa, it was North Africa that generated the largest volume of additional foreign arrivals into Asia-Pacific between 2017 and 2018.
Across the Americas, North America produced the strongest annual incremental increase in foreign arrivals into Asia-Pacific in 2018, generating almost 4.2 million of the 5.917 million increase in arrivals from the Americas between 2017 and 2018 (70.8%).
In Asia, North-east Asia as an origin market showed the strongest increase in absolute numbers out of this region between 2017 and 2018.
The collective markets of Europe added more than 8.5 million IVAs into Asia-Pacific between 2017 and 2018, with West and East Europe supplying the bulk of that additional volume between those two years.
Additional IVAs into Asia-Pacific from the Pacific between 2017 and 2018 were mostly out of Oceania.
At the individual origin market level, those with the strongest annual percentage growth rates into Asia-Pacific in 2018 were ranked as:
