Cambodian arrivals fall in Q1
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Cambodia saw a 3.4% drop in tourist arrivals during the first quarter of 2009, according to the latest statistics published by the country’s Ministry of Tourism, reported by the Phnom Penh Post.
Kong Sopheareak, Director of the Ministry’s Statistics and Information Department, was reported saying that 622,288 foreigners arrived in Cambodia during the first three months of the year, compared with 644,205 during the same period last year. The quarter-on-quarter comparison also revealed that Vietnam replaced South Korea as the biggest source of visitors to Cambodia.
The number of Vietnamese arrivals increased by 49% from 53,386 during the first quarter of 2008 to 79,724 in 2009. The number of South Korean arrivals fell from 97,536 during the first quarter of 2008 to 62,633 in 2009, caused in part by the weakness of the won curbing the South Korean outbound market.
The number of Japanese arrivals also fell markedly, from 54,149 to 41,745, while the number of US visitors dropped only slightly, from 47,612 to 46,616. The number of arrivals from Thailand fell from 40,611 in 2008 to 27,050 in 2009, due in a large part to the border tensions between the two neighbours.
“We have seen that tourists from Vietnam during this quarter have increased, while Thailand has been the opposite,” the Phnom Penh Post quoted Kong as saying. He had previously told the newspaper that this year Cambodia expects to “increase the number of tourists by 5% to 7% on top of the 2.15 million visitors we received in 2008”.
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