Hong Kong is listed as one of Asia Pacific’s top 10 most visited destinations for the eighth consecutive year in the Mastercard Global Destination Cities Index 2018 released. Ranked 14th globally and seventh in Asia Pacific, Hong Kong welcomed 9.03 million international overnight visitors in 2017. Despite dropping a notch from ranking the sixth the previous year, the city saw a slight increase in international overnight visitors from 2016 which saw 8.86 million visitors. Overnight visitor arrivals to Hong Kong are forecast to grow by 0.9 percent in 2018.
The city is currently at the tenth spot regionally, and is also expected to see 3.78 percent growth in international overnight visitor spending from US$5.92 billion in 2017.
Ranking the world’s 162 top destination cities, the Index analyzes visitor volume and spending for the 2017 calendar year and provides a forecast for annual growth, insights on the fastest growing destination cities, and a deeper understanding of why people travel and how they spend around the world.
Global & Asia Pacific Highlights:
Bangkok remains to be the No. 1 destination city in the world with 20.05 million international overnight visitor arrivals, while London came in a close second with 19.83 million visitors. Paris and Dubai came at the third and fourth spots, with 17.44 million and 15.79 million visitors respectively. Singapore remains at the fifth spot with 13.91 million visitors.
Forty-eight point five percent of travelers to the global destinations came from China, which ranks at number two among the top origin countries, next to the United States with 57.4 percent.
Dubai continues to be the top ranking destination city in the world based on overnight visitor spend, having recorded an International Overnight Visitor Spend of US$29.70 billion, followed by Makkah and London with US$18.45 billion and US$17.45 billion each.
The top three overnight international visitors in Hong Kong last year were from the Republic of Korea (12.9 percent), the U.S.A. (9.6 percent) and Taiwan (9.5 percent).