Visiting, spending in MEA, Johannesburg ranks high

The MasterCard Index of Global Destination Cities is a new approach to understanding the global economy and the dynamic flow of commerce across the world. It ranks cities by their total international visitor arrivals and the cross-border spending by these same visitors in the destination cities and gives visitor and passenger growth forecasts for 2011.

Cities measured in the MEA region included: Dubai, Cairo, Johannesburg, Tel Aviv, Casablanca, Abu Dhabi, Nairobi, Riyadh, Amman, Beirut and Tunis.

"The results show that many emerging market cities in the MEA region are showing robust growth in terms of both visitor arrivals and cross-border expenditures, with many showing expected growth rates exceeding 14%," says Anna Jones, area head, Southern Africa, MasterCard Worldwide.

In terms of where visitors to MEA cities are coming from, London was by far the biggest city of origin, with 926 000 people having visited Dubai, 282 000 visiting Cairo and 321 000 visiting Johannesburg.

For Johannesburg in particular, the top five cities of origin as measured by visitor arrivals were London, Frankfurt, Dubai, Paris and Gaborone.

"When looking at the split between Africa and the Middle East, these two regions appear to be fairly evenly spread, each featuring five cities in the top ten most visited cities in the MEA region," Jones says.

Despite featuring in the top five, Johannesburg, in particular, only saw a forecasted 9.9% increase in visitors for 2011 in comparison to 2010 and was the second lowest in terms of forecasted growth, while Cairo saw the largest forecasted growth with 21.6%.

Tunis and Dubai filled out the top three forecasted growth spots with 19.9% and 17.3% growth respectively, while Casablanca took the bottom spot with 5.5%, despite being the fifth most visited city in the MEA region.

According to Jones, in percentage growth, Johannesburg was the second-worst performer in the region, in terms of visitor expenditure, achieving only a forecasted 14.1% growth over the 2010/2011 period. The relatively low forecasted increase in visitors and their resulting expenditure for Johannesburg could be attributed to the unusually high numbers of visitors for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, which South Africa hosted that year.

Dubai took the top spot with $7.8 billion, Beirut was a second place with $6.5 billion, while Tel Aviv took third place with $3.8 billion.

At the bottom of the list Nairobi and Amman filled the eighth and ninth positions with $1.3 billion each, while Riyadh saw the least international spend from visitors with $1.2 billion.

Conversely, despite being at the bottom of the top ten cities in the MEA region, Riyadh saw the biggest expected growth in visitor expenditure, achieving a forecasted 35.5% growth for 2010/2011. Casablanca took the bottom spot with an expected growth rate in visitor expenditure of just 8.1%.

Londoners were the big spenders in the MEA region, splurging a total of $1.52 billion across three cities in the MEA region, having dropped $876 m in Dubai, $214 m in Cairo and $430 m in Johannesburg - the largest spenders in each of these three cities.

While Parisians were only the fourth most prevalent visitors to Johannesburg (148,000), they spent the second most in the city ($179 m), followed closely by visitors from Dubai who spent $160 m.

Overall London topped the world's cities by visitor numbers with 20.1 m inbound passengers expected in 2011, ahead of Paris in second with 18.1 m. Only one city in North America is in the top twenty, New York, which is ranked twelfth with 7.6 m inbound passengers expected.

London also ranked first on cross-border expenditure, ahead of New York in second place, and Paris in third. Estimated expenditures in these cities for 2011 amounted to $25.6 billion, $20.3 billion and $14.6 billion respectively.

While cities in Europe and the US ranked highly in the index, Dr Yuwa Hedrick-Wong, global economic advisor, MasterCard Worldwide said that emerging market cities in Asia, Middle East and Africa were shaping to play a much greater role in the global economy.

"Growth of outbound travel and expenditures is clearly a resilient secular trend that will continue to shape the future of globalisation," he said.

"As the global centre of economic gravity shifts inexorably to the dynamic emerging markets in Asia, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Africa, cities there will correspondingly play ever bigger roles in knitting the world together."

For the full report, go to www.masterintelligence.com