International Visitor Arrivals to 25 Asia Pacific destinations in the first quarter 2015 show that a combined inbound total of more than 101 million. This is just 1.9% off the forecast volume for that period as predicted in the ‘PATA Asia Pacific Visitor Forecasts 2015-2019 - Volume II’.
Across the region, the Americas (2 destinations) is performing at 4.9% above the first quarter forecasts, while South Asia (2 destinations) is performing at 3.2% above them. Northeast Asia (6 destinations) is just 2.2% behind the first quarter forecast, while six destinations in Southeast Asia are collectively -4.2% behind the forecast volumes. The Pacific (9 destinations) is less than one percent (-0.7%) under forecast.
Year-on-year, the first quarter results for this cluster of 25 destinations is 5.1% better than the first quarter of 2014, with an additional 4.9 million arrivals added to the collective total for the period. The strongest performers in terms of period-to-period growth are Palau (+46.6%), Japan (+43.7%), Thailand (+23.5%), Sri Lanka (+13.6%) and Korea (ROK) (+13.4%).
China has reported a first quarter gain for the first time since 2012 and, with growth of four percent, has added 1.195 million additional arrivals to the count over that of the first quarter of 2014. While it is a significant increase, it ranks third behind Japan (+1.257 million) and Thailand (+1.501 million).
The PATA Asia Pacific Visitor Forecasts 2015-2019 are a joint production of the Tourism Forecasting Unit within the School of Hotel and Tourism Management (SHTM) at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) and PATA, and provide detailed projections for individual source and generating markets at both quarterly and annual levels over the same period, along with a number of other metrics including tourism receipts and where data availability permits, departures predictions.
