What Country Travels The Most? The Top 10

There are two things you can guarantee being present when you check into any hostel in the world: a sub-standard bathroom and a British backpacker. I’m not saying the two are in any way related, but what any traveler who has spent any time on the road will tell you is that they’ve run into a Brit. Ask what other nationality, and you’re likely to get Australian, then maybe German. Which begs the question: What country travels the most?

Turns out, it’s not exactly a straight-forward answer. Predictably, the travel statistics out there usually focus on where those travelers are going (France, followed by the U.S., Spain, China, then Italy). But there is scant data on where those travelers are coming from.

WorldHum blogged about a press release back in ’06 that stated Germans took 86.6 million trips abroad, Britons took 65.3 million, and Americans took 58.3 million. This didn’t necessarily mean those counties were the most traveled internationally. It just meant that those three countries took the most trips abroad overall.

Perhaps the best method of determining this question would be to examine how much money is being spent by each nationality internationally. To do this we can look at the recent UNWTO World Tourism Barometer, a newsletter put out by the U.N. agency devoted to tourism. (The .pdf is here.)

According to the report, it turns out money is a very good predictor of travel. It was estimated that in 2009, German travelers shelled out a whopping $80.8 billion while outside their country, followed by the United States ($73.1 billion), the United Kingdom ($48.5 billion), China ($43.7 billion) and France ($38.9 billion). Rounding out the top ten were Italy, Japan, Canada, Russia, and the Netherlands.

Germany
United States
United Kingdom
China
France
Italy
Japan
Canada
Russia
Netherlands

Of course these numbers could be a little skewed by the fact that a particular country happens to be a little more frugal than another while on the road, or that one country spends a lot of money in a neighboring country. But it paints a pretty accurate picture, and also seems to back up prior data.

Surprised by the results? Where are the Aussies? How about the Swedes? China about to overtake the U.K.?

Posted on June 30, 2010 by Matt Stabile

Travel Trivia

http://twitter.com/OTbackpacking offtrackbackpacking

I was recently in South Africa and let me tell you that I think I met more Germans than South Africans. They are everywhere!!
Commonsense

so, you could not spell united states correctly?
germans definitely travel abroad the most. but, if consider miles travelled, u.s. and australia are on top.
http://the-people-square.com/ thepeoplesquare

Great topic. There are two interesting topics at work here. One – what countries financially afford to travel more and Two – what is the most common backpacker nationality. From the list it’s hard know what the type of travel preference is for each country. By this I mean do these people “vacation” or “backpack”? Do these people stay in “five-star hotels” or “backpacker hostels” ? From experience, I run into a lot of German, Dutch and Scandinavian “backpackers”, but a lot of Chinese, Italian, Japanese and Russian “vacationers”.
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Pidclinics

What about pro rata to population? UK has 86 million, USA 260 mill and gwernany 85 million people so MONEY and numbers are not correct. What about percentage of POPULATION which would place AUSTRALIA at the top of the list with 34% of its gross population travelling EVERY year
RipTorn

Ive been all over the world and everywhere ive been seems to be occupied by Americans…i dont see germans anywhere except in italy and france. certainly not in America, speaking of just america, its got a lot of great travel locations itself and you could spend a lifetime traveling the expanses of America and never see it all.
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Peter Atkins

I think your method for arriving at US citizens being the second most travelled people (forgive me it that is not you assertion) based on how much each country spends abroad is completely flawed as you have not considered differences in population. According to the UNTWO (http://www.enduringwanderlust.com/who-travels-the-most/):

“According to the World Tourism Organization or UNWTO,
Europeans travel more than all other regions combined with a whopping
52.8 percent of all outbound tourists. Asia and the Pacific (21 percent)
and the Americas (16 percent) make up most of the rest of the outbound
travelers with the Middle East (3.8 percent) and Africa (2.9 percent)
rounding out the field.”

“The Americas” in this case would include Canada, US and all Central and South American citizens combined. I imagine that this population would have to double or treble the population of the US, which would be roughly equivalent to the population of Europe.

Perhaps travel is seen as an upper-class luxury in the US whereas many other world citizens will endeavour to do it no matter what their budget.

Of course, it’s not hard to “travel” to another country in Europe; most of the time it would just involve a drive down the road. I entered four countries in about five hours in Europe. That would hardly get you through the same amount of small country towns in Australia.

So… sorry mate, I don’t think your argument holds water.

Lol

you’re a moron dude…stop with the America hate…you just look hysterical and insecure.

Face it, Americans travel more and broader spaces than most other people…its a fact.

Daniel Murphy

sorry mate, your either trolling or missed his point.

All he is saying is that this is running absolute values instead of per capita values.

as per the response bellow (Jutta Tilvis (Finland)) the amount spent per person from each country changes the results considerably, placing Aussies at the top (something that most backpackers would agree with on a who they met scale).

Also, there wasn’t any american hating. We Aussies tend to travel multiple times during our life (big overseas trips i mean). Quite a lot of Americans i met while traveling were doing there “one big trip”, having finished college and blasting around a bit before going to get a “real” life. The whole kids and a white picket fence thing. Its different ideals about traveling is all.
YanksR Turds

Bull…How many countries you visited “mate”…if you include your troops in the figures…of course you’ll win!

Jutta Tilvis (Finland)

In the most recent UNWTO World Tourism Barometer (data from June 2011) it also ranks the countries by expenditure per capita (US$) in the following order:Australia 1,014Germany 952Canada 866United Kingdom 780France 625Italy 449United States 244Japan 219Russian Federation 189And dropping China way down on the list with only 41.
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Conti Matteo

I think is not a good ranking. Firstly because of the question: who travel the most? It means how many trips or how many people brought abroad? If the latter, it s very bad about expenses because if two very rich German went abroad and spent 40 billon dollars and 10 millon chinese went abroad and they spent 100 dollars each they gonna spend less than Germans but they brought much more people. If we want to ask how many trip were done independently of it dependes on frequency or number of people, so we should know the average expenses per trip. Maybe some countries have the average higher than other because they do mostly business travels and other leisure travels.

Anonymous

Well, like I said, there’s no clear data for exact numbers, so this is the best I could come up with. I agree, it’s probably not the most accurate, but assuming it’s those countries with the most money that probably travel internationally the most, then this gives us a good rough idea (probably breaking it down per capita would be best, but would likely result in similar ordering).

mai

This says more about the population size than the willingness to travel.
mai

This says more about the population size than the willingness to travel.

Anonymous

Absolutely, this needs to talk about spending per capita. I’m pretty sure Australians should be near the top of this list. Everywhere I go I meet Aussies.

http://www.facebook.com/patteconomist PaTt Economist

Why don’t have the thailand in list ?
http://countryskipper.com/ Sabrina

How interesting! I wonder what that boils down to if you look at spending per average person. That would probably move the US and China much lower in the list because they have so many more people than, say, the Netherlands. Cool post!

Being German, I am sitting here thinking that 80 billion divided by the 80 million or so population comes down to 1000 per person. Wow! Considering that many people don't travel at all, that is pretty high…

http://intensedebate.com/people/TheExpeditioner TheExpeditioner

Very high, of course, like I said in the post, Germans probably spend a lot of money driving to neighboring countries and spending money, but it still gives a pretty accurate picture.

no one

where do germans like to go most?

Torsohero

Germans are very curious about the all countries.
Germans have much more holidays than other nations, they do several trips per anno. It’s pretty cheap to go from Germany to other European destinations. Germans love to travel to all European countries, especially Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Turkey. Those who can afford often like to go to U.S., South-East-Asia, South-Africa, Carrbibean or Australia.

What Country Travels The Most? The Top 10

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