The Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) has been collating, assessing and sharing international visitor arrival (IVA) forecasts annually for the past two decades. However, with the onset of COVID-19 and the ever-changing landscape of the pandemic, these forecasts, published in conjunction with Hong Kong Polytechnic University, have been increased in frequency to be distributed quarterly, as per media reports.
Given the level of uncertainty and a number of myriad factors driving travel industry recovery, these forecasts have been published under a range of three scenarios – mild, moderate and severe pandemic impact.
The latest scenario forecasts for IVAs into 39 Asia Pacific destinations between 2022 and 2024, show generally strong growth rates following a slight annual gain in foreign arrival numbers in 2021 under the mild scenario. For the medium and severe scenarios, calendar year 2021 is expected to be the bottom of the arrivals trough, with substantial annual growth rates occurring thereafter to 2024.
These will result in strong increases in absolute numbers of IVAs, however, only under the mild scenario is the volume of international arrivals expected to exceed that of 2019 and then only in 2024. The medium scenario predicts IVAs reaching a similar volume as that of 2019 by 2024. However, the severe scenario suggests a shortfall of almost 30% by 2024.
In absolute terms, the number of international arrivals forecast for 2022 now ranges from almost 315 million under the mild scenario, to 229 million under the medium scenario and 159 million under the severe scenario.
Asia is predicted to return to a significant level of dominance, supplying more than 64% of all IVAs into Asia Pacific in 2024, under each of the three scenarios, followed by the Americas and Europe.
Overall, while the trends in these latest forecasts are positive, there are still challenges ahead, not the least of which will be containing the spread of the Delta and Omicron variants of COVID-19.
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