UNWTO: International Tourism to Reach Pre-Pandemic Levels in 2024

CGTN Europe

Sandra Carvão is Chief of Tourism Market Intelligence and Competitiveness at the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). She speaks to CGTN Europe about the organisation's latest findings.

Transcript

00:00 Global tourism is returning to pre-pandemic levels according to the United Nations World

00:05 Tourism Organization. In 2023, international tourism reached 88% of 2019 levels with an

00:13 estimated 1.3 billion international arrivals. Last year, the overall contribution of tourism

00:20 to the global economy was 3.3 trillion dollars or 3% of global GDP. Some regions,

00:28 including the Mediterranean, Europe, the Caribbean, Central America and North Africa,

00:33 exceeded their 2019 tourism numbers. Chinese inbound and outbound tourism is expected to pick

00:41 up due to visa simplification and improved airline capacity. Beijing recently granted visa-free travel

00:48 to visitors from Switzerland, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Malaysia.

00:54 The spring festival holiday of course set to boost the rebound further. Well, let's talk now to Sandra

01:02 Carvo, the Director of Market Intelligence and Competitiveness at the United Nations World

01:07 Tourism Organization. Good to see you. Welcome, Sandra. Well, the tourism industry will be opening

01:12 the champagne after some terrible years. They will be delighted about this, won't they?

01:19 Thank you. It's great to be here and share the latest data. Actually, rebound has been very

01:24 strong already in 2023, as you just mentioned. But our first scenarios for next year point that

01:31 we will not only reach the level of pre-pandemic in 2024, but our central forecast is that we can

01:40 even exceed it by around 2%. There's some big factors at play here. Obviously, lockdowns have

01:45 gone away, the pandemic has gone away. But China going back on holiday, that's pretty significant,

01:52 isn't it? Definitely. And I always like to recall that in 2020, in the peak of the pandemic impact,

01:59 we lost around 70% of all international travel, which means we went back to levels of 30 years

02:05 ago. So just imagine how much this industry has been affected. China is definitely one of the key

02:11 source markets. It was the first spender in international tourism pre-pandemic. So the

02:17 return of the Chinese outbound is very much a welcome news, particularly for Asia destinations,

02:23 naturally. We've seen that spending is already in a very good positive trend at minus 26% around Q3.

02:34 So we do expect that to be consolidated with 2024 news on visa, which is very welcome as well.

02:42 Which European countries are set to benefit from this increase in tourism?

02:48 Well, we've seen many smaller destinations had impressively good results in 2023. We're talking

02:55 about Albania, we're talking about Serbia, Andorra. Many of those countries passed by far already

03:02 their levels of 2019. But then again, in terms of income, which is also very interesting,

03:10 we see countries like Portugal, Turkey already having their tourism earnings in terms of

03:16 international travel surpassing pre-pandemic levels. I want to ask you about the Middle East.

03:21 We were reporting on the crisis in the Middle East earlier on in this program. Are we able to say how

03:28 much the current crises are affecting tourism in the region? Well, actually, the Middle East was

03:35 the only region globally that already surpassed their levels of pre-pandemic. International travel

03:42 to the Middle East increased by 22% in 23 as compared to their pre-pandemic levels. And

03:50 the data for December continue to have that trend. Actually, also, if we look forward for the

03:57 bookings in terms of air travel, our partner Ford Keys that provides us insights in this area,

04:04 their data shows that in the first half of next year for the moment, the bookings are pretty

04:11 positive in comparing to 2023. So data shows for the moment that we see the region continue to grow.

04:19 Sandra, good to see you. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Sandra Carver.

Category

Transcript

Recommended