Quick tourism facts from around the world

Quick tourism facts from around the world

Dubai saw tourism revenues fall 15 percent in the first quarter of the year. We check out some global tourism trends during the same period.

May 19, 2009 12:53 by Aarti Nagraj

3. About 740 million people visited Hong Kong in the first quarter of the year, a year-on-year increase of 1.8 percent, said the Hong Kong Tourism Board. About 245 million people visited Hong Kong in March 2009, 1.7 percent more than the same month in 2008.

However, the country saw a 20.7 percent drop in the number of tourists from North Asia, and a 9.2 percent decrease in the number of arrivals from Taiwan.

4. According to the Czech Statistical Office, the number of guests at accommodation facilities in the country dropped to 2.3 million in the first quarter of this year, a fall of 8.4 percent as compared to the same period last year.

The number of foreign visitors to the country dropped by 17.1 percent, although the number of domestic guests was 1 percent higher.

5. The number of foreign tourists visiting Britain in the first three months of this year was 13 percent lower than the corresponding period in 2008, official data shows. Foreigners made 6.28 million visits to Britain between January and March 2009, down from 7.19 million last year, with the biggest decline in the number of visitors from North America and Eastern Europe.

Visitors spent $4.73 billion in the country, almost unchanged from last year despite the pound losing around a fifth of its value against major currencies during the intervening period.

6. During the first quarter of the year, Estonia’s accommodation facilities welcomed 359,000 tourists, 14 percent less than the previous year, according to Estonian Statistics. The number of visitors on business trips decreased 28 percent, while the number of tourists on holiday trips went down by 9 percent.

More than half of the 194,000 foreign tourists during the period came from Finland, but the number of Finnish tourists had decreased 8 percent compared to the same period in 2008.

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Tags: decreasing, Dubai, Estonia, Financial Crisis, global, Hong Kong, hotels, revenues, slowing, tourism, Turkey, UK