Diya Upreti, Jadetimes Staff
Diya Upreti is a Jadetimes news reporter covering Travel News
It's all eyes on the International tourism is expected to leave doldrums and recover to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2024. Industry has picked up the pace within the last couple of years of recovery since the global travel disruptions, supported by air connectivity that is increasingly boosted by pent-up demand for travel. According to the UN World Tourism Organization, there has been a strong sense of full recovery of performance in tourism, with leading key regions such as Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Each one of these places, by all measures, is approaching, or far surpasses 2019 levels in every respect.
Europe is now at 94% of its pre-pandemic level - the world's most-visited region. Such a robust rebound in the region has been driven by intra-regional travel and the height of interest coming in from the U.S. Africa and the Middle East have done extremely well by current era benchmarking, with Africa recovering to 96% of its 2019 levels and the Middle East having tourist arrivals come in 22% higher than the same year.
Asia, which lags behind in a quick recovery since travel restrictions lasted for pretty long, finally catches up. Several Asian markets have opened up, and this region is to experience fast recovery in the year 2024. The reversal of trend is particularly going to be driven by Chinese outbound tourism. The silver lining of this new policy is that citizens of many European countries and other countries would enjoy visa-free entry into China. Tourism between China and the world will then start increasing its tempo.
This rebound is also turning into substantial economic benefits. International tourism receipts have already reached $1.4 trillion for 2023, almost at 93% of the earnings in 2019. The sector has substantially added to the world economy, supporting millions of jobs and fueling expansion in several regions. Tourism professionals still hold out hope for the future and expect 2024 to be better than 2023 with better travel facilitation measures adopted across various regions.
Overall, with improvement in air travel coupled with the easing of restrictions imposed on traveling across the globe, international tourism will surely regain that loss completely by the end of 2024 and this marks a landmark event for the traveling industries, which finds its way back to track.
