What is the fastest rising travel destination?

Posted On January 30, 2025January 30, 2025

Understandably, few industries were as kneecapped by the Covid-19 pandemic as the tourism industry. After the travel restrictions began to be lifted in 2021, the entire industry has been in a mad scramble to make up for a two-year deficit brought on by no income, let alone growth. Even four years on, there’s something almost desperate in the sheer saturation of adverts for airline companies and national tourist boards, but there are a few countries whose tourism industry is booming in this (supposedly) post-Covid world.

In fact, there’s an entire region whose tourism numbers have actually risen over pre-pandemic numbers. The Middle East has seen record numbers of tourists choose to take their holidays there, hosting an astonishing 87 million holidaymakers in 2023 alone. The signs in 2024 have been promising, and looking like an even bigger year is incoming. However, the Middle East is a huge, huge part of the world. Which part of it has taken the crown as the world’s leading tourist destination?

It’s hardly surprising if you keep your ear to the ground, but according to a study conducted by the finance website Insider Monkey, the highest-growing tourist destination of 2024 is Qatar, beating out, surprisingly, Albania at number two. This checks out as the international profile of Qatar skyrocketed by being the shock pick to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Despite the ongoing (and justified) controversy surrounding the choice, the tournament itself became one of the most-watched of all time and introduced Qatar to the international spotlight, along with introducing the Qatar Grand Prix in 2021.

Those two events helped Qatar attract over four million international tourists over the course of 2023, mainly centred around the country’s capital city of Doha. Considering Qatar’s location in the heart of the Persian Gulf, it’s no surprise that it’s also the beneficiary of several deals with major cruise lines like the Royal Caribbean Cruises, Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings and MSC Cruises.

So, where to from here? In 2024, Qatar succeeded in improving its 2023 tourism numbers, welcoming five million international tourists into the country. Considering that they welcomed fully half their total number of 2023 visitors into the country in the first four months of 2024, the writing was on the wall from the very beginning. However, they beat their record by a million visitors, so why stop there? 2025 has, at the time of writing, only just begun, and their profile is still thrillingly new.

There is so much to see there, too, from new buildings like The Pearl and The Qatar National Library to places that show their connection to the country’s rich history, like the Katara Cultural Village and the Souq Waqif. It’s a phenomenon well worth the level of international scrutiny it comes under, but above all, one can see why millions and millions of people flock toward the country for their holiday and why millions and millions more will be doing so for a very long time.

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