Asian Travel And Tourism Industry Showing Positive Signs : WTTC Report

The Asian travel and tourism industry is showing positive indications of recovery, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC), with five major metropolises experiencing a considerable economic rebound.

The report, which was written in collaboration with Oxford Economics, analyzed significant data from 82 global cities, including traveller spending, employment, and the GDP contribution of travel and tourism. There were five Asian cities in the top 25 whose local economies are most impacted by the travel and tourism industries.

Bangkok, Beijing, Seoul, Singapore, and Tokyo will have the best performances among Asian cities in 2022, according to the report. The report demonstrates that in these important economic engines, travel and tourism's direct contribution to GDP is improving, albeit slowly, as a result of ongoing border closures and severe travel restrictions. Although the picture for spending by foreign visitors is slightly different, all cities are beginning to show signs of economic recovery as a result of the spending by foreign visitors once again. With the exception of Tokyo, whose sector employment market is rebounding more slowly than the majority of the other cities, sector job levels are also rising once more in most of the cities.

According to the WTTC's Cities Economic Impact Report, these five countries' combined capital cities received $106.9BN in travel and tourism-related spending in 2019. However, only Beijing has recovered to levels that are near to 2019, indicating that the pandemic has had a serious and enduring impact on the region. The largest city in Asia and the one with the most positive indicators of recovery is Beijing. Because of a robust domestic tourist rebound, the sector's contribution to the GDP in 2022, at $32.6BN, was just 4% lower than it was in 2019. Tokyo has the second-largest travel and tourism industry in the area, with a 2022 value of $18BN, albeit this is still 30% below the value of 2019.

The GDP contribution to Seoul was $8BN in 2018, 33% less than in 2019. The GDP contribution in Singapore was 45% lower in 2018 than it was in 2019. The sector's contribution to Bangkok's GDP in 2022 was $9.2BN, 54% less than in 2019.

WTTC President & CEO Julia Simpson said:  "Asia has long been a world-favourite destination and after more than two years of disruption, it is great to see tourists and business travellers heading back. Tourism provides a massive boost to both the economy and job creation. Our Cities Economic Impact Report shows that we expect Beijing to overtake Paris to become the world's largest city Travel & Tourism economy within the next decade. It is crucial that the national and local governments continue to recognise the importance of Travel & Tourism for the local and national economies, jobs, and businesses."

In these five capital cities of Asia, there were more than three million individuals working in the travel and tourism industry in 2019. The two cities with the highest employment rates were Beijing and Bangkok, each with over 1.3 million and slightly over one million workers, respectively. However after two traumatic years of job losses, the total number of jobs in the sector recovered to 2.5 million by 2022. The number of sector positions across all cities was lower in 2022 than it was in 2019, but Tokyo's troubling year-over-year job reductions persist.