Peter de Jong, president and chief executive of the Pacific Asia Travel Association was addressing the Asia-Pacific Aviation Management Roundtable held by the Economist Conference in Hong Kong yesterday.

"The engines of growth have been Northeast and Southeast Asia, with Northeast Asia in particular continuing on a solid upward path during 2002. One of the key players, of course, is China, which, in the first seven months of this year, posted a spectacular increase of more than 16 per cent in foreign visitor arrivals," de Jong said.

He said the increase was spectacular because "in the current global climate, where else can one see percentage gains of 30, 40 and even 50 per cent plus in international traffic? Where else but the People's Republic of China?" He added that countries once highly dependent on the United States and Japanese markets seemed to have suffered more than those that had diversified their dependency on different markets.

Recent short-term travel forecasts released by the association suggest that several destinations within the Asia-Pacific region can also expect to see strong double-digit growth each year between now and 2003, de Jong said. These gains are not just in one or two source markets but virtually across the board, said de Jong. A recent report showed that international visitor arrivals to China increased in 39 out of the 42 origin markets surveyed, he said.

(China Daily November 1, 2002)