Foreign tourist arrivals drop by 10 percent in 2016
The number of foreign tourists visiting Laos dropped for the first time in 2016 after several successive years of visitor growth, newly compiled statistics suggest. Laos registered average annual growth in foreign tourist arrivals of 10.7 percent on average over the past five years. But last year, just over 4.23 million foreign visitors came to the country – a drop of 10 percent compared to 2015, according to statistics supplied by the Tourism Development Department of the Ministry of Information, Culture and Tourism. Collectively, visitors from the other nine ASEAN member countries dropped by about 14 percent to just over 3 million people. Tourists from the Asia Pacific region dropped by 11 percent to just over 3.9 million people, and visitors from the Americas dropped by 3 percent to just 86,211 people.
