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Five Indian cities — Mumbai (ranked at 27), Chennai (30), Delhi (48), Kolkata (62) along with Pune (91) — have made it to the top 100 destination cities for 2016, while Bangkok has emerged as the leading destination city in terms of international overnight visitor arrivals.
A study by global payments and technology company Mastercard showed, the Thai capital received about 21.47 million international overnight visitors in 2016, just ahead of second-ranked London.
According to the sixth annual Mastercard Global Destination Cities Index, Mumbai and Chennai have stood out as the fastest growing destination cities globally with at least one million overnight visitors in 2016, ranked at number 14 and 19, respectively.
“Mumbai is also the only Indian city to enter Asia Pacific’s Top 10 Destination Cities in terms of international overnight visitors in 2016. Ranked at number 10, right after Shanghai, the city boasts of 4.86 million visitors along with a visitor spend of $3.6 billion for the year 2016,” the study added. Parag Bhatnagar, Vice President, Marketing, South Asia, Mastercard said, “With an evolving business landscape and thriving tourist destinations, India has been witnessing a high influx of overseas travellers for both business and other purposes. This trend also projects a huge potential for Indian cities to develop as global hubs for investment in terms of business and tourism alike.”
Interestingly, Asian cities make up half of the global top 10 cities —Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Tokyo and Seoul — and seven of the top 10 fastest growing destination cities — Osaka, Chengdu, Colombo, Tokyo, Taipei, Xi’an and Xiamen.
The Mastercard Index of Global Destination Cities ranks cities in terms of the number of their total international overnight visitor arrivals and the cross-border spending by these same visitors in the destination cities, and gives visitor and passenger growth forecasts for 2016.
Public data is used in deriving the international overnight visitor arrivals and their cross-border spending in each of the 132 destination cities. The index and the accompanying reports are not based on Mastercard volumes or transactional data.
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