The Most Popular Travel Destinations In The World

[rogerhood]

Every country is beautiful in its own manner and is really worth visiting, but there are some countries that attract much more tourists than others.
There is the list of the 5 of the most visited countries of the last several years:

1) France (76.7 million visitors a year)

2) Spain (51.7 million visitors)

3) U.S. (41.9 million visitors)

4) Italy (39.8 million visitors)

5) China (36.8 million visitors)

This is the data of 1998:

1) France (70 million visitors)

2) Spain (47,7 million visitors)

3) United States (47 million visitors)

4) Italy (34,8 million visitors)

5) United Kingdom (25,4 million visitors)

[LeFrenchy]

For sure it is always interesting to remind what are the top 5 international tourist destinations, and i guess it must be the official figures that are released by the World Tourism Organization.

But the funny thing, when you are working in the tourism sector and have to dig a bit beyond these figures (this is my case), is that actually... nobody knows exactly how many international tourists are coming to France !...

And there are good reasons for that : the forms you had to fill when checking in a hotel were suppressed 30 years ago ; and since the implementation of Shengen area in 1997, it has become impossible to carry on with enquiries at borders...

So when you are talking with the respectable statisticians from the french Ministry of Tourism, and ask them how they do to calculate these figures, they explain with an awkward look that they still rely on the latest border enquiries (from 1997), which are updated and ponderated with lots of subtle calculations, using trends extracted from other enquiries, etc...

It is also interesting to notice that, when you consider the same top 5 but in terms of tourism receipts (spendings), France only comes 3rd, behind the US and Spain. The main reason being that France has a lot of short stays and cross-border visitors, whereas the US and Spain have a lot of mid and long-stay international visitors, who consequently spend more.