Budapest bronze medalist destination city

The Hungarian capital overtook major European tourist destinations as Brussels, Zurich or Moscow, magyarhirlap.hu said. The list was compiled by MasterCard, based on the estimated number of foreign visitors a given year.

According to recent years’ statistics, Budapest is the second-fastest popularizing city in terms of number of visitors, so it can be the trendiest destination in the foreseeable future.

The card company estimates nearly 3.2 million foreign visitors will travel to Budapest this year, which means a 1.3% increase compared with last year, Turizmus.com wrote. With this, the Hungarian capital overtook major European cities as Brussels, Zurich or Moscow. In a global summary, Budapest is the 41^st of the examined 132 cities, the 16^th in Europe, overtaken only by Vienna and Prague in the region. Endre Eolyus Hungary and Slovenia Director for MasterCard said the statistics are encouraging.

As he said, the growth rate based on the number of visitors coming to Budapest was 7.4% per year, which is the second best in the region. According to the survey, the largest amount of money is spent in Vienna in the region (HUF 218 thousand), which is more than twice as many as in Budapest (HUF 98 thousand). Moscow is somewhat behind Budapest in the number of overnights, but it is the second-most popular looking at the spending per capita.

The overall ranking has been led by London for the fifth time: it can expect 18.82 million visitors. In Bangkok, which is the second, there will be nearly the same number of visitors, but it is projected they will spend USD 8 billion less than in London. The third is Paris with 16 million visitors and USD 16.6 billion spending. The second-largest amount of money – USD 17.4 billion – is spent in New York – which is the sixth. According to the data, the upsurge of Asian cities is quite clear.

From the four fastest-growing cities, there are 3 in this continent: Colombo, Sri Lanka, Chengdu, China and Osaka, Japan. Half of the Top10 cities are also in Asia, 3 in Europe (one of them is Istanbul), one in North America and one in the Middle East. In the Top10, the biggest increase compared to last year was reached by Istanbul (11.4%); looking at the past 7 years, Bangkok (11.7%) and Seoul (11.4%) are in the lead.

based on the article of magyarhirlap.hu
translated by BA

Source: http://magyarhirlap.hu