Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
East Asia Pacific (EAP) (397 million) and the Americas (282 million). This implies that
EAP will experience the highest rates of growth in line with previous studies (Hall and
Page 2000; Page 2001), achieving rates of 5 per cent growth per annum, in excess of the
world average growth rate of 4.1 per cent. It is also expected that Europe's share of
international arrivals will drop from 60 per cent in 1995 to 46 per cent in 2020, as world
tourism is reconfigured geographically to accommodate new trends in demand for EAP.
At the same time, long-haul travel will be expected to grow at 5.4 per cent 1995-2020,
while intra-regional travel will only grow at 3.8 per cent per annum.
Table 2.4:
The world's leading international
tourism destinations (by country): 1980 and 2002
compared
Country
Number of arrivals
Rank 2002
Rank 1980
France 77,000,000 1 1
Spain 51,000,000 2 2
USA 41,900,000 3 3
Italy 39,800,000 4 4
China 36,800,000 5 19
UK 24,200,000 6 7
Canada 20,100,000 7 6
Mexico 19,700,000 8 8
Austria 18,600,000 9 5
Germany 18,000,000 10 9
Source:
modified and developed from WTO data for 1980 and 2002
PATTERNS OF DOMESTIC TOURISM
The growing interest in Tourism Satellite Accounts has seen a growing research focus on
domestic tourism in many countries, to try to fill in the missing gaps in research
knowledge that prevail in this area of tourism research. What might have been a fair
assessment of the situation in the early 1990s by D.G.Pearce (1995a:67) that 'domestic
tourism, which is often more informal and less structured than international tourism, and
a consequent tendency by many government agencies, researchers and others to regard it
as less significant' has been re-examined in many countries, as slow growth rates in
international tourism and crises in arrivals after disasters such as 9/11 led to a major
refocusing of attention on domestic travel in the USA and Europe, for example. Certainly
government agencies began to realise the significance of domestic tourism. Nevertheless,
a paucity of data in some countries is problematic, since it is not a straight-forward matter
of recording arrivals and departures. It requires an analysis of tourism patterns and flows
at different spatial scales to consider spatial interaction of tourists between a multitude of
possible origin and destination areas within a country as well as a detailed understanding
of inter-regional flows. In some cases, these flows can be identified from well-known
tourist circuits, such as the UK's milk run of coach tourism circuits between the popular
