Italy attracting more visitors from Saudi Arabia

Italy has reported a record 68 per cent year-on-year increase in the number of travellers visiting the country from Saudi Arabia.

The northern part of the country has become an especially popular destination for Arabian visitors, according to new figures from ForwardKeys and reported by tourism-review.com.

The data – which focused on long-haul travellers and was collected from more than 200,000 travel agencies worldwide – also shows that Italy is seeing increasing numbers of visitors from Australia, Mexico and India.

According to tourism-review.com “the real stars of Italian tourism for the summer of 2016 are the Saudis [who] arrived in masses in June and were increasingly present in July, particularly in Milan and northern Italy. In August there will be 68% more Saudis than in August 2015”.

It wasn’t all good news for Italy however, as the data also showed that from long-haul arrivals were 2.4 per cent lower for the period 1 June to 31 July 2016 compared to the same period in 2015. This is largely due to a fall in visitors from the Far East and Brazil, but partly compensated by increasing numbers from the USA, Argentina, Mexico and Australia.

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