Top 20 Global Travel Destination Cities

Dubai led all cities with over $2,000 in spending per overnight visit in 2016, according to the Mastercard Global Destinations Cities Index.  New York was a distant second at about $1,500.  Taipei, Seoul and Tokyo rounded out the top 5.

In general, Asian cities experienced higher growth than European ones.  Osaka and Tokyo had the highest growth in spending from 2015 to 2016, both over 12%.  Bangkok and Seoul followed with 9% or greater growth.

Most large European destinations lagged in both average spend per overnight stay and in spending growth.  Prague, Paris, Rome, Milan and Amsterdam clustered together at about 2% growth and $500-750 per night spend.  London and Barcelona experienced both higher growth and higher average spend, about 7% and $1,000 respectively.

The bubble chart below shows average spend per night, growth in spending, and number of overnight visits for the top 20 travel destination cities as measured in number of overnight visits:

I tried a new tool, PDFTables, to extract the data from the Mastercard report and move it into an Excel spreadsheet.  The tool worked really well, allowing me to easily copy the data I needed from a table in the pdf into my spreadsheet.  I then created a 4 column table, extracting city name, number of visits, and growth rate and calculating spend per visit.  I created a chart in PowerPoint from the Excel data using the Mekko Graphics Excel add-in.

I made adjustments to the x and y axis maximums to better layout the data and the chart margins.  I also moved some of the bubble labels.  I added a legend using the group column in the Mekko Graphic Data Editor.  This allowed me to color the bubbles based on region and show the regions in the legend.  I added axis titles and a description in the reference bubble.  If you'd like to edit the chart, you can download it from SlideShare.