American Love Tourisum

Amrican Love Tourism 

At first glance, the zobee Traveler 50 Most Visited Attractions List confirms several tourist industry truisms: A) Americans love to travel, but they prefer to stick within their own borders. B) Wherever Mickey Mouse goes, he conquers. C) Paris is the unofficial cultural theme park of the world. And D) Niagara Falls isn’t just for lovers anymore.

But the list also contains several surprises. Since the Taj Mahal—our fiftieth and final attraction—receives 2.4 million visitors a year, several popular favorites like the the Prado (2 million), the Uffizi (1.6 million), Angkor (1.5 million) and Stonehenge (850,000) didn’t make the cut. And while Western audiences may not be familiar with names like Everland and Lotte World, these South Korean mega-parks managed to rank 16th and 22nd on our list, respectively.
Not surprisingly, the French are out in force. How to account for the preponderance of attractions in Paris? According to the latest statistics report from the World Tourism Organization, France receives more foreign tourists per year than any other country -- some 76 million in 2005. Spain followed with 55 million, the United States with 50 million and China with 47 million. Italy rounded out the top five with 37 million (with the U.K. not far behind).
And given that we chose to include domestic tourism statistics, why wouldn’t India, China and the developing world have more attractions on the list?
The three primary factors appear to be relative GDP (recall that significant majorities of the populations of China and India remain at subsistence level), the vast travel distances involved within those countries, and the lack of reliable visitor statistics. We were nevertheless surprised to learn that the Taj Mahal receives only 2.4 million visitors a year, given India’s population of over a billion. And while the Great Wall made the top 10, we couldn’t find any other Chinese domestic attraction that drew similar crowds. Expect that to change in the years ahead.