Feel like airport security lines keep getting longer, or that you are booking hotel reservations way further in advance than you used to?<\/p>\n
It is true. The UN’s World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) has just released its 2024 year-in-review data, confirming that the tourism industry has bounced back from the pandemic.<\/p>\n
About 1.4 billion people travelled internationally last year, which is 99 percent of the number who did the same in 2019, the last full year before Covid-19 hit the world.<\/p>\n
That amounted to US$1.9 trillion being spent in the tourism industry, meaning each tourist spent more than $1,000 per person on average.<\/p>\n
But where did people go?<\/p>\n
Overall, Europe was the most-visited continent with 747 million tourists in 2024, according to the UNWTO.<\/p>\n
That number was especially impressive considering that Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine kept travellers away from parts of the region, notes the tourism body in its report.<\/p>\n
France was the world’s most-visited nation in 2024, with 100 million tourists, according to figures recently released by the country’s tourism board. Spain made a strong showing with 98 million tourists to land in second place.<\/p>\n
“2024 was an exceptional year for French tourism, promising prospects for 2025!” Atout France, the country’s national tourism marketing department, said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The statement cited the 2024 Summer Olympics, the re-opening of Paris’ iconic Notre Dame cathedral, and the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy as three major events that people traveled to France for in the past year.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the UNWTO reports that 316 million people travelled to Asia and the Pacific in 2024, 213 million went to the Americas, 95 million to the Middle East and 74 million to Africa. There was no data on tourism to Antarctica.<\/p>\n
rnz<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Feel like airport security lines keep getting longer, or that you are booking hotel reservations way further in advance than you used to? It is true. The UN’s World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) has just released its 2024 year-in-review data, confirming that the tourism industry has bounced back from the pandemic. About 1.4 billion people travelled […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":12505,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12504"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12506,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12504\/revisions\/12506"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}