Four Asia-Pacific markets make up one-fifth of global travel spending

Asia-Pacific’s fast-growing — but as yet, largely untapped — travel market

This is according to Mastercard’s new breakout report Global Destination Cities Index (GDCI) Origins, which ranks where the most international travellers to the world’s 200 most popular tourist cities and regional centres are from.

Business and leisure travellers from the top 10 Origin markets comprise nearly half (49.1 per cent) of all overnight international visitor arrivals to the 200 destinations and 48.4 per cent of their total expenditure, demonstrating the potential of the insights to help shape decision-making for governments, merchants, and the global travel industry which contributed a record $8.8 trillion and 319 million jobs in 2018.

The shift points to the Asia-Pacific’s fast-growing – but as yet, largely untapped – travel market, according to Mastercard’s senior vice president of data and services for Asia-Pacific, Rupert Naylor.

“What’s most fascinating for us from an Asia-Pacific perspective is the fact that not only has this region’s spending contribution to global travel expenditure nearly doubled in the last decade, but we’ve barely scratched the surface in terms of percentages of the populations that are travelling overseas. This is particularly significant in mainland China, India, and Indonesia – three of the most populous places on Earth – where only 1, 0.5, and 1.7 overnight international trips were made per 100 residents to the 200 destinations in 2018, demonstrating the vast and still emerging potential of tourism and travel from these markets. This represents significant opportunities for local governments and businesses to leverage these insights to better plan and promote their travel, tourism, and retail offerings,” said Rupert Naylor.

The reports released that travellers from mainland China, South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan are among the region’s biggest spenders.

The report, which draws on data from third-party sources, including the World Travel & Tourism Council, examined the total number of international overnight visitor arrivals in 2018 to find the world’s leading outbound travel markets. It comes as part of wider Mastercard research into the global travel industry, set to be released later this year.