World Tourism Rankings (Infographic)
There were almost a billion tourists in 2010 (940 million). Where did they go? This infographic shows what it would look like if every tourist took the same plane, seated by destination.
If you haven’t memorized every country’s flag, please hover over the section for the country name and number of international arrivals.
Top 10 Tourist Destinations
| Rank | Country | Arrivals (millions) | Seats |
| 1 | France | 76.8 | 41 |
| 2 | USA | 59.75 | 32 |
| 3 | China | 55.67 | 30 |
| 4 | Spain | 52.68 | 28 |
| 5 | Italy | 43.63 | 23 |
| 6 | UK | 28.13 | 15 |
| 7 | Turkey | 27 | 14 |
| 8 | Germany | 26.88 | 14 |
| 9 | Malaysia | 24.58 | 13 |
| 10 | Mexico | 22.4 | 12 |
France Is #1. Unless It’s China
The number one tourist destination is technically France. Those 76.8 million arrivals would fill 41 metaphorical seats. Behind that is America, China and Spain. However, if you include Hong Kong and Macau (Chinese territories), China jumps from number 3 to number one (87.68 million arrivals and 47 seats).
Europe Is Still Hot
As you can see, the front rows are full of European arrivals – France, Spain, Italy, Germany, etc. Europe still accounts for about 50% of tourist arrivals, followed by Asia Pacific with 12.7%.
India Is Fail
What’s striking to me is that India is punching nowhere near its weight – it only has three seats for 5.58 million arrivals – despite being the seventh largest landmass in the world (and awesome) gets less tourists than Singapore (9.16 M). Or Syria (8.55 M), for that matter.
Australia gets a similar amount of tourists (5.89 M), but they earn $30.1 billion in tourism receipts. India earns less than $15 million. I mention India because it was Kanti Bajpal’s article on this subject that got me looking at the data in the first place.
Sri Lanka, of course, is not really on the map (654,000 arrivals), despite having the highest growth rate in the world at 46.1%.
Sources
The Google Doc with tables: http://goo.gl/EQxKA
The UNWTO (UN World Tourism Organization) data: http://goo.gl/3eM70 (PDF).
You can find bigger versions of this infographic on Flickr
Today on the 
Janith has updated 
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Sri Lankan domestics never say anything, they just stop coming. My maid just stopped coming and when I finally pressed her she said I needed to get a washing machine. I was hoping to ride this one out, but I’ve run out of underwear and I have no choice. I finally caved and bought a washing machine, from 
Cool!
I would like to see the reverse of it too – Which nation has more travelers.
So the French get to sit in business class? How and why is that fair?
wow great graphic work indi, good promo for you if you can get this infograph to be picked up by a international news agency.
[...] woefully unpublished but available here: World Tourism Infographic. Running around all day. Raining. These are two columns for the papers this Sunday. The Ceylon [...]