Sandra Carvão is Chief of Tourism Market Intelligence and Competitiveness at the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). She speaks to CGTN Europe about the organisation's latest findings.
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00:00 Global tourism is returning to pre-pandemic levels according to the United Nations World
00:05 Tourism Organization. In 2023, international tourism reached 88% of 2019 levels with an
00:13 estimated 1.3 billion international arrivals. Last year, the overall contribution of tourism
00:20 to the global economy was 3.3 trillion dollars or 3% of global GDP. Some regions,
00:28 including the Mediterranean, Europe, the Caribbean, Central America and North Africa,
00:33 exceeded their 2019 tourism numbers. Chinese inbound and outbound tourism is expected to pick
00:41 up due to visa simplification and improved airline capacity. Beijing recently granted visa-free travel
00:48 to visitors from Switzerland, Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Malaysia.
00:54 The spring festival holiday of course set to boost the rebound further. Well, let's talk now to Sandra
01:02 Carvo, the Director of Market Intelligence and Competitiveness at the United Nations World
01:07 Tourism Organization. Good to see you. Welcome, Sandra. Well, the tourism industry will be opening
01:12 the champagne after some terrible years. They will be delighted about this, won't they?
01:19 Thank you. It's great to be here and share the latest data. Actually, rebound has been very
01:24 strong already in 2023, as you just mentioned. But our first scenarios for next year point that
01:31 we will not only reach the level of pre-pandemic in 2024, but our central forecast is that we can
01:40 even exceed it by around 2%. There's some big factors at play here. Obviously, lockdowns have
01:45 gone away, the pandemic has gone away. But China going back on holiday, that's pretty significant,
01:52 isn't it? Definitely. And I always like to recall that in 2020, in the peak of the pandemic impact,
01:59 we lost around 70% of all international travel, which means we went back to levels of 30 years
02:05 ago. So just imagine how much this industry has been affected. China is definitely one of the key
02:11 source markets. It was the first spender in international tourism pre-pandemic. So the
02:17 return of the Chinese outbound is very much a welcome news, particularly for Asia destinations,
02:23 naturally. We've seen that spending is already in a very good positive trend at minus 26% around Q3.
02:34 So we do expect that to be consolidated with 2024 news on visa, which is very welcome as well.
02:42 Which European countries are set to benefit from this increase in tourism?
02:48 Well, we've seen many smaller destinations had impressively good results in 2023. We're talking
02:55 about Albania, we're talking about Serbia, Andorra. Many of those countries passed by far already
03:02 their levels of 2019. But then again, in terms of income, which is also very interesting,
03:10 we see countries like Portugal, Turkey already having their tourism earnings in terms of
03:16 international travel surpassing pre-pandemic levels. I want to ask you about the Middle East.
03:21 We were reporting on the crisis in the Middle East earlier on in this program. Are we able to say how
03:28 much the current crises are affecting tourism in the region? Well, actually, the Middle East was
03:35 the only region globally that already surpassed their levels of pre-pandemic. International travel
03:42 to the Middle East increased by 22% in 23 as compared to their pre-pandemic levels. And
03:50 the data for December continue to have that trend. Actually, also, if we look forward for the
03:57 bookings in terms of air travel, our partner Ford Keys that provides us insights in this area,
04:04 their data shows that in the first half of next year for the moment, the bookings are pretty
04:11 positive in comparing to 2023. So data shows for the moment that we see the region continue to grow.
04:19 Sandra, good to see you. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Sandra Carver.