Asia Pacific Travel Demand To Grow By 4.6% Each Year Until 2020–Study

A travel association on Thursday projected that foreign tourist arrivals in the Asia Pacific region will grow at an average rate of 4.6 percent each year to reach in excess of 647 million by 2020.

In the newly-released Asia Pacific Visitor Forecasts 2016-2020, the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) said that the study covered 38 key destinations within the Asia Pacific region.

The study showed that Asia would continue to increase its relative dominance of foreign arrivals into the Asia Pacific region through to 2020, increasing its relative share of these arrivals from 72 percent in 2015 to better than 73 percent by 2020.

This, at a time when the absolute volume of arrivals into Asia Pacific generally was predicted to rise from 528 million to 647 million over the same period.

Southeast Asia will continue with its dramatic rise in foreign arrivals, improving its relative share from just under 20 percent in 2015 to around 22.5 percent by 2020, rivaling the share of the Americas at that time (22.6 percent).

Asia will also continue to generate more international arrivals into Asia Pacific, increasing its count from 355 million visitors in 2015 to around 448 million by the end of this decade.

That will see the Asian component of arrivals into Asia Pacific – as defined in this summary report – increase from 66 percent (2015) to over 68 percent by 2020.

Northeast Asia is expected to generate an expected 333 million international arrivals into the region in 2020 or more than half of the total foreign inbound volume expected in that year.

Meanwhile, intra-regional flows will continue to remain strong for most of the Asia Pacific regions, but across the region, the influence of the Asian source market is undeniable and will only grow stronger, at least in the majority of cases.

The Americas is expected to generate around 113 million arrivals into the Asia Pacific region in 2020 driven largely by North America which will contribute close to two-thirds of that volume in its own right.

The 47 million arrivals from Europe expected in 2020 will come from firstly West Europe (19.5 million) but also by North Europe (14.7 million) – together, these two origin sub-regions will generate close to two-thirds of the total arrivals from Europe by the end of the forecast period (2020).

PATA CEO Mario Hardy said that actual foreign arrival numbers into Asia Pacific at the aggregate level have been within two percent of predictions made in the last few PATA forecasts.

“This last series of predictions again highlights the rapidly approaching need for aggressive and appropriate visitor management processes to be installed and operational,” Hardy said. (PNA) RMA/ANP