China Tourism Report Q1 2007

New This Quarter

Updated Business Environment Rankings

This quarter, BMI has made wholesale revisions to its tourism business environment rankings, which can be found on page 18 of this report. These rankings form the cornerstone of our analysis of the Asian tourism industry's prospects across our forecast period to 2011. By weighing long-term political and economic trends, coupled with analysis of the regional governments' commitment to investment in the tourism industry, we can form a proprietary table setting out the rankings of eight Asian nations (China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam) and how we believe their tourism industries will fare in the years to come. Based on our analysis conducted over the first two months of 2007, we believe that Singapore has the brightest overall tourism prospects - in large part due to its strong record of political stability, as well as our view that government investment in the industry will still be high as a percentage of overall GDP. Indonesia fares least well on our analysis, although strangely enough we believe that the archipelago has the greatest potential growth in terms of visitor arrival numbers between now and 2011. Certainly, it would seem that the cheap value offered by holidays to Indonesia may well outweigh the political risks and relative lack of investment in the industry from Jakarta.

China comes in third place in our regional rankings. Its international tourism receipts for 2006 were the highest in the region, and its political government's commitment to investment in the industry were areas