Recovery Planning from COVID-19 in Jordan
23rd June 2020
Acorn Tourism has been contracted by USAID in Jordan to develop forecasts using their Acorn Tourism Model (ATOM) methodology to predict arrivals and expenditure in the country for the period 2020-2030 and to make estimates of the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic based on previous tourism satellite accounting work carried out for the Ministry of Tourism.
ATOM bases forecasts on origin-destination pairs, so works at a detailed level analysing the flow of tourists from source markets to destinations taking into account a number of factors including the source market economy, historical tourism flows, distance and modes of travel used between the two locations, the distribution of travel by purpose of visit, and now additional factors such as the prevalence of COVID cases and travel restrictions in place.
At Acorn Tourism we are constantly tracking external factors that are expected to impact on the tourism sector, in particular during these uncertain and unprecedented times. At present, we predict that global tourism will shrink to just 502 million international overnight visitor arrivals in 2020, a drop of 65.7% on 2019, or 961 million fewer arrivals worldwide.
Whilst all regions of the world will be affected, we expect the Asia/Pacific region to record the largest drop in tourist arrivals, down 71.1%, with the Americas faring the best, dropping 60.1%. In terms of expenditure, we forecast international tourists spending just US$ 535.6 billion in 2020, a loss of US$ 970.7 billion compared to 2019.
However, the model predicts a strong bounce-back in 2021, with 1,015 million arrivals, growing to 1,403.1 million in 2022. However it will take until 2024 before international tourist arrivals reach the levels recorded on 2019.
