PATA Travel Mart 2024 underway with Asia Pacific arrivals forecasts positive
The Pacific Asia Travel Association (PATA) Travel Mart 2024 gets underway this morning with some 266 sellers representing 168 organisations from 24 destinations hoping to establish and strengthen relationships with 191 buyers from 173 organisations from 21 source markets.
Contents
Connection
Attendance at B2B travel trade events like PATA Travel Mart continues to be essential.
At the Amazing Thailand welcome reception last night, delegates Robert Basiuk of Borneo Adventure and Willem Niemeijer of Khiri Travel shared how important face-to-face meetings were to their businesses.
Human contact is vital to establishing the rapport and trust one needs to form any serious relationship, they said. Video call technologies are no substitute.
Forecasts
Many PATA Travel Mart 2023 attendees will be buoyed by international visitor arrivals (IVAs) forecasts cited by PATA CEO Noor Ahmad Hamid at yesterday’s media briefing.
PATA’s intel unit predicts that Asia Pacific’s 2026 IVAs will exceed 2023 IVAs of 503.51 million by as many as 406 million under “mild” conditions. Even in a “severe” scenario, 2026 IVAs should exceed 2023 IVAs by at least 93 million (but with arrivals dipping in 2024).
In context, IVAs in 2019, the year before COVID-19, numbered 682.67 million.
Mr Hamid identified factors affecting the forecasts — climate change, economic uncertainty, geopolitical tensions, human resource challenges — that he says PATA has insights about and strategic responses to. [See pic below in new tab.]
PATA will continue to champion “the three ‘R’s of tourism”, the CEO said, encouraging its members and the industry at large to be:
- Resilient
- Responsible; and to
- Reimagine.
Come a long way
Earlier in the briefing, PATA Chair Peter Semone offered some historical and geographical context for the Association:
“PATA was born in Hawai’i,” he said. “From the outset, PATA was founded on the connection between travel and peace.
“Founders Lorrin Thurston (a journalist/newspaper publisher) and William Mullahey (a Pan American Airways executive) realised that …
‘… having achieved peace, we can make, in this great Pacific, on its islands and its shores, and among its people of widely differing cultures, a place of attraction for all people of good will.’
“Out of the smoulder of WW2, PATA was born to help build tourism economies for the benefit of people across the Pacific.
“PATA [the Pacific Asia Travel Association] was originally called the Pacific Area Travel Association as at that time much of Asia was still underdeveloped and there was scattered geopolitical conflict, particularly in Indochina.
“In the early 1950s, when PATA was founded, there were 25 million visitor arrivals recorded globally. In 2019, so-called International Visitor Arrivals or IVAs reached 1.5 billion globally.”
Very few of the 25 million arrivals would have been to or within Asia Pacific. In 2019, however, the PATA region accounted for 682.67 million, or nearly half of the 1.5 billion.
Mr Semone also talked about five key challenges for the travel & tourism industry.
Fine dining: Macau hosts PATA Gold Awards lunch
Update to post: The Macao Government Tourist Office (MGTO) once again hosted the annual PATA Gold Awards lunch as it has done for many years now.
It was a fabulous four-course fine-dining event at Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre. Everyone who attended was a winner.
“GT” Publisher David Gillbanks attended PATA Travel Mart 2024 as a media delegate.
Featured image (top of post)
PATA’s intel unit predicts that Asia Pacific’s 2026 IVAs will exceed 2023 IVAs of 503.51 million by as many as 406 million under “mild” conditions. Even in a “severe” scenario, 2026 IVAs should exceed 2023 IVAs by at least 93 million (but with arrivals dipping in 2024). PATA Chair Peter Semone looks pleased. Pic by David Gillbanks.
