Tourists plump for Bangkok in MasterCard survey
BANGKOK ranks as this year’s world number one city that international tourists most visited out of 132 countries, Thai PBS quoted MasterCard’s latest Global Destination Cities Survey as saying.
Bangkok was visited by 21.47 million international tourists, followed by London with 19.88 million foreign visitors, Paris with 18.03 million, Dubai’s 15.27 million and New York’s 12.75 million.
MasterCard said that the growth of destination cities depends critically on their ability to tap into feeder cities in origin countries that are experiencing strong outbound tourism. In the case of top-ranked Bangkok, its five most important feeder cities are Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur and Dubai.
About 32% of Bangkok’s international visitors originate from outside of Asia-Pacific. In terms of visitors’ countries of origin, China is the biggest accounting for 37% of Bangkok’s international visitors, followed by Japan’s 8%, US at 4% and India and Germany at 3%.
The fact that Bangkok is successfully tapping into fast-growing feeder city like Dubai suggest that Bangkok’s legendary resilience as a destination city is likely to endure, said MasterCard.
Among the 20 top cities, Osaka posted the strongest growth in international visitors at 13.3% while Bangkok’s growth rate is 9.6%, the fourth fastest growing of the top 20.
In terms of spending by international visitors, Bangkok is also the regional top-ranked at US$14.84 billion, followed by Tokyo’s $13.48 billion. Tokyo’s second-ranked position reflects a much higher-per-visitor spending – at $1,152 compared with Bangkok’s $691.
A breakdown of the spending in Bangkok by international visitors is as follows: accommodation, 26.0%; food and beverage 19.4%; shopping 21.7%; local transport 9.9%; local services 20.8%; miscellaneous 2.2%, Thai PBS said.
CAPTIONS:
TOP: A tuk-tuk packed with tourists goes through a Bangkok road. Photo: M-louis (CC-BY-SA-2.0)
INSET: The guardian statue at the Grand Palace. Photo: Bvi4092(CC-BY-2.0)
SOURCE: Thai PBS
By Thai Residents reporters
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