Asia continued to be the dominant source market for IVAs into Asia Pacific in 2018

Data from the Annual Travel Monitor 2019 Final Edition released by the Pacific Asia Travel Association last month shows that Asia continued to dominate the supply of international visitor arrival numbers (IVAs) into Asia Pacific in 2018, generating close to 63% of the 697 million IVAs into the region.

In percentage growth terms between 2017 and 2018, Africa outbound into Asia Pacific had the strongest annual increase at over 13% year-on-year, followed by Europe at almost 11% and then Asia at 7.3%. The nondescript ‘Others’ category increased by 7.5% in 2018, year-on-year.

By annual increase in the absolute volume of foreign arrivals over that same period, these positions changed somewhat, with Asia generating close to 30.3 million additional foreign arrivals, followed by Europe with more than 8.5 million and then the Americas with just over 5.9 million. Africa generated a volume increase of just under half-a-million IVAs.

Out of Africa it was North Africa in particular that generated the largest volume of additional foreign arrivals into Asia Pacific between 2017 and 2018.

While across the Americas, North America produced the strongest annual incremental increase in foreign arrivals into Asia Pacific in 2018, generating almost 4.2 million of the 5.917 million increase in arrivals from the Americas between 2017 and 2018 (70.8%).

In Asia, Northeast Asia as an origin market showed the strongest increase in absolute numbers out of this region between 2017 and 2018.

The collective markets of Europe added more than 8.5 million IVAs into Asia Pacific between 2017 and 2018, with West and East Europe supplying the bulk of that additional volume between those two years.

Additional IVAs into Asia Pacific from the Pacific between 2017 and 2018 were mostly out of Oceania.

All told, 46% of the 245 origin markets (including ‘Others’) covered in this report had annual growth rates in excess of 10%, while 66% grew by five percent or more between 2017 and 2018.

Interestingly, each of these top five origin markets are within the Asia Pacific region. Intra-regional travel remains very strong.

Of the source markets covered in this report, 12 (~ 5%), generated annual volume increases of more than one million each, while 20 (~ 8%), produced more than half a million additional IVAs into Asia Pacific between 2017 and 2018.

While, Greece and Bulgaria are both out of Europe and represent extra-regional increases into Asia Pacific in early 2019 over early 2018, the remainder in this group are all from within Asia Pacific.