One billion international visitor arrivals into APAC on the horizon: PATA

Asia Pacific remains solidly on the path to welcome close to one billion international visitor arrivals (IVAs) over the next five years. This is one of the key predictions from the Executive Summary of the Asia Pacific Visitor Forecasts 2020-24, released by the Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA).

Covering the years 2019 to 2024 and 39 destinations within the region, these forecasts anticipate a volume of over 971 million international visitor arrivals into Asia Pacific, by 2024. The strong increase in IVAs has been driven by the average annual growth rate (AAGR) of 5.3% between 2014 and 2019, and that momentum is expected to increase even further over the next five years, to average 6.3% per annum between 2019 and 2024.

This will result in an acceleration of more than 256 million additional IVAs into the region between 2019 and 2024, a significant increase over the additional volume of 162 million added between 2014 and 2019.

The distribution of these IVAs in Asia Pacific is expected to change only marginally from 2019, with the Asia and Pacific regions expected to show some relative, as well as absolute increases in arrival numbers.

“Ensure management practices.”

Asia is forecast to remain as the dominant destination region and is likely to improve its relative share to over 77% by 2024.The Americas will come in second, although its share is expected to reduce slightly over the period between 2019 and 2024.

“For many destinations, there is now an immediate and necessary shift from generating arrivals to properly managing those visitors. It is no longer enough to think and talk about this, the time to put into action such management practices that ensure that visitors into and across the Asia Pacific region receive a superlative and memorable experience is now,” said Mario Hardy, CEO of PATA.