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In terms of tourism, a country or regions success is measured by how many tourists they attract (arrivals) and how much revenue these tourist´s generate (receipts). In this article I want to paint a brief picture of how the world looks when you inspect it through the figures and graphs generated by a tourism ranking. The statistical methodology of measuring and ranking tourism receipts and arrivals is like many other statistical tasks in that it requires a level of approximation but the reference point in the world´s tourism ranking´s is the UNWTO world tourism barometer. There are many regional rankings such as those published by Eurostat and numerous national rankings like those created by Spain´s Institute of Tourism Statistics (IET.) So, the global leaders… As with most global tourism rankings, the U.S. leads the way. It is really interesting to see that in terms of receipts the U.S. leads the 2010 ranking with $103.5 billion and an 11% share of world receipts and that the following two countries, Spain and then France, together account for the same amount of receipts than that of US. However, fascinatingly, when we turn our attention tourism ranking´s ordered by international tourist arrivals, France leads by a huge margin. If you take in to account that France, as an EU member has borders that are open to the rest of mainland Europe and this arrivals figure does not take into account the majority of tourist´s entering from the whole of Europe, this figure is even more astounding. So, America´s relatively isolated physical position in the world helps it massively in terms of revenues from tourism. As many of the flights entering the U.S. will be long-haul flights, tourists entering the U.S. in general stay for longer periods and the longer you stay, the more you spend. As long as the North Atlantic ridge stays calm and America maintains it´s love affair with the world, we can probably expect America to maintain it´s position at the top end of world tourism receipts for a while to come. (Rob)
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