Destinations of the World: Tourism Trackers & Rankings
Methodology and Coverage.
As of 19 January 2026
@thequietanalyst
Global Tourism Destinations, is a project that tracks monthly international tourism data at the destination level in order to facilitate the analysis of global tourism trends.
Changelog.
December 2025: All destinations for Turkey changed from international arrivals at borders (which includes same-day and overnight visits), to international arrivals at accommodations. This solves the problem of transit in Global Hub destinations like Istanbul versus end point leisure destinations like Antalya, where international visitors enter into Turkey via Istanbul but only for transit as they then fly on the same day domestically to their actual end point e.g. Antalya. In 2025 this has the effect of boosting Antalya overnight arrivals by more than 5 million and reducing Istanbul’s by a similar amount. As a result of these changes several Turkey destinations are removed from coverage as their overnight arrivals values drop below the threshold of 200,000. These include
Agri, Artvin, Hakkari, Igdir, Kirklareli, Sirnak.
In addition, the following 5 French Destinations have been removed for the same reason
Vendée Department (La Roche-sur-Yon), Finistère Department (Quimper), Charente-Maritime Department (La Rochelle), Dordogne Department (Périgueux), Landes Department (Mont-de-Marsan)
In their place, we include these 11 French Destinations at the NUTS3 level
Aude Department (Carcassonne), Côte-d’Or Department (Dijon), Corse-du-Sud Department (Ajaccio), Haute-Garonne Department (Toulouse), Ille-et-Vilaine Department (Rennes), Loire-Atlantique Department (Nantes), Loiret Department (Orleans), Manche Department (Cherbourg), Meurthe-et-Moselle Department (Nancy), Nord Department (Lille), Pyrénées-Atlantiques Department (Pau)
October 2025: Doha, Qatar added
Indicators Tracked
•Overall International Tourist Arrivals (M,A)
•Breakdown by Origin Market (M,A)
•Outbound Tourists (M,A)
•Overall Spend (A)
•Category of Spend (A)
•Purpose of Visit (A)
•Category of Spend (A)
•Seasonal Index (M, A)
•Source Diversification / Concentration (see below)
Data Sources and Harmonization
•The underlying data have been sourced primarily from National Tourism Boards, International Visitor Surveys, and International Organizations
•The base indicator is the International Tourist – a non-resident Visitor who stays one or more nights at the destination
•In adding new destinations, we try to keep the cut-off at a minimum of 200,000 tourists in 2019.
•The geographical size of Destinations are kept at the NUTS3 level for Europe except in the case of London which is kept at the NUTS2 level. In other cases, the use of urban agglomerations is largely dependent on data availability. For example, USA uses Metropolitan Statistical Areas, Thailand uses provinces etc.
•Tourists can be grouped into two categories: by paid accommodations using data collected at for example hotels and motels and by all accommodations (includes non-paid accommodations e.g. staying with Friends and Relatives, data is collected via IVS surveys). In many cases we use whatever is available , but default to all accommodations where possible. The difference between paid and all accommodations is approximately 10-15%.
•Data at the destination level often lags data at the National level. As such, we use national level to derive estimates for the destination level until they “catch up”. In these cases, data is always retroactively updated when they become available.
Exclusions
Some origin markets have been specifically excluded from certain destinations:
-Malaysian citizen arrivals to Singapore by land (as the Singapore Tourism Board specifically excludes coverage of this)
-Arrivals between Mainland China, Hong Kong SAR, Macao SAR and Taiwan.
-From time to time certain destinations are excluded from coverage as tracking becomes difficult due to conflict. Currently these include destinations in Markets like, Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Syria, Lebanon and Myanmar
In order to measure how diversified (or concentrated) a destination is in terms of its source markets, we have created an indicator using a modified Herfindahl–Hirschman Index to measure origin market concentration.
Each Destination has a Source Concentration (Diversification) Index score that Tracks how Diversified (lower index score) or Concentrated (higher index score) a destination is in terms of its origin markets. The Concentration score ranges from 1 (Perfect Diversification of Source Markets) to 100 (Full Dominance of Destination international arrivals by a single Origin Market)
Concentration scores can be further categorized as follows
The Index is best understood by considering the extremes. At the highly concentrated extreme is Yala (Thailand) which had a concentration score of 98 in 2024. Its largest source of overnight tourists was from Malaysia which contributes 99% of all international overnight tourists as Yala sits just across the Malaysian border and draws a lot of land border traffic. Very high concentration index scores like this alert us to this type of land or sea (as in the case of Singapore to Batam Island in Indonesia’s Riau Archipelago) border crossing tourism. At the other end of the spectrum is Istanbul (3.2) in 2024 where no single origin market contributed more than 11% of tourists.
The Index also tracks the evolution of concentration as certain origin Markets become more dominant in their contribution to the overall share of tourists in a destination. Jeju Island (South Korea) is an interesting case in point. Jeju’s concentration score went from an already high score of 25.4 in 2009 to an even higher 75.4 in 2016 in the space of 7 years. In 2009, China and Japan contributed 45.4% and 19.0% respectively, but by 2016 Mainland China’s share doubled to a dominant 86.8% mostly at the expense of Japan whose share dropped to 1.0%. This means that Jeju was uniquely placed to continue benefitting from the surge in outbound China, but would also be vulnerable to any pullback in Chinese tourism demand or diversion of it. This latter scenario was borne out in 2018 as Jeju’s concentration index fell to 28.9 as China’s contribution scaled back to 52.2% of arrivals due to cross-border tensions.
Below is the list of Destinations covered by this project.