Industry Reports & Trends

China is becoming the world’s largest outbound market with departures of 28.5 million in 2004 and an increase of 9.6%, taking the number up to 15 million, for the first half of 2005. Tourism bodies are keenly monitoring the Chinese outbound market, which is estimated to explode to no less than 100 million travelers by 2020, and with each traveler spending $175 per day.

An estimated 460 million international tourist arrivals were recorded worldwide in the first seven months of 2005. This represents an increase of some 25 million arrivals compared with the respective period of 2004, or 5.9% growth, according to the preliminary data gathered for the new issue of the WTO World Tourism Barometer, which was presented during the first day of the recent WTO international conference on the Tourism Satellite Account in the Iguazu region.

Tourism Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos, busy promoting Greece abroad, last month visited the United States once again where this time instead of movie makers he was on hand to receive an award from the country’s biggest travel magazine, Conde Nast Traveler, whose readers chose Greece, Myconos in particular, as their preferred travel destination.

Many e-commerce vendors learned the hard way in recent years that you can’t take a uniform approach to selling in international markets, and a new PhoCusWright study on the online travel market in the U.K., Germany and France brings home that theme.

The Institute of Tourism Research and Forecasts (ITEP) last month released figures that offer an insight into how the 14 million tourists expected to visit the country this year might spend their money during their stay.

The strong rise in the number of foreign visitors this year should not cause officials to relax their efforts to solve the problems of the tourism industry, the Association of Greek Tourist Enterprises said last month.

Both private and public sector tourism leaders predict that final tourism arrival figures for this year would show a double-digit increase over last year.

Overwhelmingly, consumers are turning to the Internet for their summer travel planning and purchasing needs, according to independent research conducted by Feedback Research, a division of the Claria Corporation a leader in online behavioral marketing in the U.S.

The number of tourists that entered Greece during the month of August mark an impressive rise against the last few years. This year’s peak travel period was so strong that a good number of hotels around the country were unable to absorb the demand.

Hospitality and other travel service providers could see revenues from travel by the disabled double if they removed obstacles and made their hotels, restaurants and transportation systems more accessible, a new study has found.