China: More than just the Great Wall

The latest MasterCard Worldwide Index of Travel reported that 31.6% of business travellers worldwide visited China in the past 12 months with 40.1% of business travellers from Singapore visiting China during the same period.

Business visitors to Hong Kong have also increased since six months ago from 16% to 17.1%, making it the second most frequent destination for business travellers. Singapore has dropped a notch to become the business executive’s third key destination, dropping slightly from 17% to 15.5%. Japan still remains as the fourth most visited country for business travellers as it did six months ago.

Indonesia saw a bulk (51.1%) of its business travellers visiting Singapore. A significant number of business visitors from Vietnam (40.4%) and Malaysia (32.6%) are also headed to Singapore.

Continent-wise, business travellers are making Asia Pacific their most frequent destination at 89.7% of the time compared to North America and Europe, at 15.1% and 9.1% respectively.

Eight out of 13 countries say that business travellers prefer use their in-house travel department for executive travel arrangements. This number has grown from five out of 13 countries in the last report. For business travellers from Singapore alone, 46.9% of them rely on in-house travel arrangement.

Thirty-nine percent of over 400 people in Singapore polled for this survey travelled internationally for business over the past 12 months, although some said they travelled for both business and personal reasons.

The survey for the MasterCard Worldwide Index of Travel was conducted across 13 Asia/ Pacific markets.