a seriesInternational arrivals
also: ST.INT.ARVL · international tourist arrivals
Every market-size claim about this field eventually leans on an arrivals number. The series counts crossings.
How many international arrivals a country recorded in a year. The World Bank republishes it from UN Tourism's Yearbook and Compendium of Tourism Statistics. Its own definition sets the boundary: "International inbound tourists (overnight visitors) are the number of tourists who travel to a country other than that in which they have their usual residence, but outside their usual environment, for a period not exceeding 12 months". 199 codes carry a value here.
The story Cited · wb-tourist-arrivals
Two sentences in the World Bank's own metadata do most of the work. The first: "The data on inbound tourists refer to the number of arrivals, not to the number of people traveling. Thus a person who makes several trips to a country during a given period is counted each time as a new arrival." A patient who flies out for a consultation, again for the operation and again for a review is three arrivals and one person.
The second concerns comparability. Collection differs by country — border police in one, hotel registrations in another, air arrivals only in a third — and some countries count nationals resident abroad while others do not: "Caution should thus be used in comparing arrivals across countries." Where a country cannot supply overnight visitors, the Bank prints visitors instead, which includes same-day crossings, cruise passengers and crew. Poland's 88,515,000 for 2019 and Hungary's 31,641,000 for 2020 are counts of that kind, and neither describes a holiday, still less a hospital admission.
The third thing is the calendar. For 132 of the 199 codes in this fetch the most recent year with a value is 2020, and for 70 more it is 2019. A map drawn from the latest available year therefore draws the year the borders shut, and this site says so beside the map rather than under it.
Inference — the series has no field for purpose. Somebody who flew in for a knee replacement and somebody who flew in for a beach sit in the same cell, and no arithmetic on this table separates them. The market-research totals for this field are usually built by taking a number of this shape and applying a percentage from elsewhere; that operation is not in the data.
How it works Harvested · wb-tourist-arrivals
Fetched by tools/harvest_worldbank.py from the World Bank indicator API, values from 2010 onwards, the most recent non-null year kept per country with the year stored beside the value.
Notes
The Bank's own aggregates ride the same endpoint with two-letter codes — High income (XD), OECD members (OE), Latin America & Caribbean (ZJ) — and are the largest values in the table. They are not countries and they are excluded from this site's maps by joining on the country outline file rather than on the series. Country counts on this page were re-read on 17 September 2026, after the harvest started dropping the World Bank's own aggregates — income groups, regions, the euro area — which arrive on the same endpoint wearing two-letter codes. One of them, XN, is "Lower middle income" at the Bank and northern Cyprus on this site's map.
The particulars
| publisher | World Bank |
|---|---|
| region | Everywhere |
| publisher | World Bank Open Data, from UN Tourism (Yearbook and Compendium of Tourism Statistics) |
| unit | arrivals a year |
| indicator | ST.INT.ARVL |
| years | 2010 to the most recent reporting year; 132 codes stand at 2020 and 70 at 2019 |
| countries | 199 |
| license | CC BY 4.0 |
| updated by publisher | annually, as UN Tourism compiles national returns; coverage past 2020 is thin |
| counts | Arrivals of overnight visitors from abroad, or, where a country cannot report those, visitors — which takes in same-day crossings, cruise passengers and crew. |
| does not count | People. Each trip by the same person counts again, so the total is crossings, not travellers. Nothing in the series records why anybody came: there is no treatment field, no purpose field, and no way to separate a patient from a holidaymaker or a visiting relative. It counts nobody who crossed by land where a country reports air arrivals only — which removes most of the Mexican border dental trade — and nobody who did not appear at a border at all. |
| links | World Bank indicator page · UN Tourism statistics database |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-17 |
What it connects to
Pages that point here
Sources
- International tourism, number of arrivals — indicator ST.INT.ARVL — World Bank Open Data · link (read 2026-09-17)
- World Bank Open Data — health and tourism indicators — The World Bank · link (read 2026-09-16)
- Tourism Statistics Database — UN Tourism (World Tourism Organization) · link (read 2026-09-17)
Where it came from: Cited a source named here · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Trade practice how the trade works, hedged · Inference this project's own reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.