MasterCard launches new travel data website
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MasterCard Worldwide today launched MasterCardCities.com, a new website that reveals how connected the world main destination cities are, based on international air travel and cross-border spending trends.
The site features an interactive world map of international air travel between 132 cities across the world, which were part of the recently-released MasterCard Worldwide Index of Global Destination Cities.
The Index aimed to quantify the human dimension of globalisation, and the economic and business impacts of international travel. The global map on MasterCardCities.com sorts the Index data by top origin cities of visitors or by the most popular outbound destinations from each city. Additionally, the map offers breakdowns of how much travellers are spending in each city, total number of inbound and outbound visitors and the overall percentage of business travellers.
The Index revealed that Asia Pacific was highly represented by international passenger arrivals with eight cities featuring in the top 20 globally. Among those, Bangkok ranked third, projected to have 11.5 million visitors this year, followed by Singapore in fourth place with 11.4 million visitors and Hong Kong in fifth with 10.9 million visitors.
The region also performed well based on visitor spending. Bangkok is ranked fourth globally with an expected US$14.4 billion to be spent by inbound passengers in 2011. Sydney ranked sixth with US$13.8 billion, Singapore ninth with US$10.8 billion and Hong Kong 10th with US$10.4 billion.
The new study was led by Dr Yuwa Hedrick-Wong, Global Economic Advisor to MasterCard Worldwide.
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