Northstar

The Indispensable Travel Industry Read Feature Highlight When luxury travel meets social responsibility Vol. 3 Issue 14 | 15 May 2012 | www.travelweeklyweb.com | Published by Travel & Meetings Group, Ten Alps Communications Asia Pte Ltd Indonesia, Philippines and Chile – World's fastest growing travel markets Seven out of 10 of the world's busiest inter-city routes are within Asia, with Indonesia, the Philippines and Chile showing impressive growth, in addition to the BRIC markets. Last week, we looked at how profitability for Asia Pacific-based airlines went down by 47 per cent for the year 2011. Despite that, Asian airlines' international passenger traffi c grew and this time, we review trends in the worldwide passenger demand between regions, countries and specific airports with comparison between the full 2011 passenger volumes and 2010 data, analysed and conducted by the market intelligence solution, Amadeus Total Demand. The most important inter-regional growth patterns of last year are led by Asia. Traffi c between Asia and Europe, and between Asia and North America, grew by nine per cent. Traffic between Asia and the Middle East grew six per cent reaching 38 million travellers in the year. Compared with the previous year, two per cent fewer passengers travelled between Africa and Europe in 2011; this was the only region pair with a significant traffic fl ow decrease over the period. All fi gures relate to passengers travelling between a given origin and fi nal destination airport, irrespective of the number of connecting stops. The global fi ndings are a striking reaffi rmation of the rapid growth in the travel industry which we are currently seeing across Asia Pacifi c. "To hold seven of the world's top ten inter- city routes all within the domestic borders of Asian countries is testament to the signifi cant role APAC plays within the global travel market today. Amadeus is committed to delivering world-class solutions that help our customers get the most out of this expanding market and continue to grow their business," said David Brett, president of Amadeus Asia Pacifi c. BRIC countries still maintain strong growth The 2011 country statistics reveal, unsurprisingly, that the strongest growth in absolute passengers is led by the BRIC countries. China registered an additional 19 million in 2011 than 2010, Brazil, 12 million, India, eight million and Russia, six million. Indonesia came in as the fi fth strongest growth market with an additional fi ve million passengers in 2011. Egypt and Japan are among the fastest shrinking markets, possibly due to the Arab Spring and the Tsunami. From the world's top ten inter-city routes, seven are within the domestic borders of Asian countries, out of which three are in Japan. In terms of volume, the route between Jeju and Seoul is the most important (almost 10 million passengers) followed by Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo (approximately eight million passengers). The leading transaction processor and provider of advanced technology solutions for the global travel and tourism industry, Amadeus is able to provide detailed demand data for any origin and destination pair in the world. Data is mined from a large number of sources including commercial and government airline and airport traffic statistics as well as major GDSs. The data is then processed by a cutting edge computing algorithm and robustly tested to ensure the highest accuracy of results. News SIA's full year profi ts went down to S$336 million Hotels Page 3 Frasers Hospitality launches hotel residence brand Page 7

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