And the most visited international destination in 2016 is…

According to Skift, in a recently released survey conducted by MasterCard, Bangkok took away top honours as the number one city in the world in terms of Overnight International visitors. Now before we proceed, what I guess "overnight" means in this context is that the said visitors have spent at least one night in the city, as opposed to transit folks or day-trippers. Given that Bangkok is involved, we thought this clarification was needed!!!

Pic courtesy: http://www.thousandwonders.net/Bangkok

Global Destination Cities Index (GDCI) is a ranking that's been initiated by the financial giants Mastercard, which explained in a nutshell, is a bid to track and understand which cities globally attracting traffic. They've broken down the results into a lot of varying sub metrics based on major geographical sub groups such as North America, Latin America, Europe, Middle East & Africa and Asia Pacific (APAC), but we've stuck just to the macro numbers and tried to understand things from an Indian sub-continent & APAC perspective.

Delving deeper into these numbers, Bangkok came in with a whopping 21.47 million overnight visitors in 2016, surpassing London at #2 by a fair margin. In comparison, London recorded 19.88 million visitors.

Interestingly, of the top 20, nine were from the Asia Pacific region – Bangkok, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, Tokyo, Osaka, Taipei, Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Sadly Mumbai and Delhi didn’t make the top 20. Mumbai just missed out in fact, coming in at 27, while surprisingly Chennai was ranked 30, ahead of Delhi at 48. The writing on the wall couldn't be more more evident, as there's tremendous room for India to raise its game here. 

I was curious to find out how many flight a day there were actually between India and Bangkok. Here’s some numbers on the same. Here’s some interesting data:

• 7 daily out of Mumbai, which 3 are on Jet Airways
• 6 daily out of Delhi, out of which 2 are on Jet Airways
• 6 daily out of Kolkata
• 3 daily out of Chennai
• 2 daily out of Bangalore
• 1 daily each out of Hyderabad and Cochin (Kochi).

That's a grand total of 26 flights a day from the subcontinent to Thailand and back.

Bottom line

Bangkok hitting the top spot shouldn't come as a surprise. They've offered a visa on arrival for most countries for as far as I can remember. And there's a plethora of hotel options, covering the whole spectrum from luxury all the way down to backpacker hostel type places (and possibly lower). The manageable exchange rate has kept BKK within easy reach for India's burgeoning middle class. And of course, there’s a veritable buffet of “entertainment” options that we don't feel able writing about in detail!