Maybe it’s the fact that there are vending machines that dispense solid gold. But Dubai is significantly outpacing all other cities when it comes to how much money overnight visitors are spending.

Last year, its 14.9 million visitors parted with $28.5 billion, according to the Mastercard Destination Cities Index. Even though New York and London are magnets for shoppers, both cities lag far behind Dubai, with visitors spending $17.02 and $16.09 billion respectively last year.

While Bangkok is the most popular destination overall – with 19.4 million visitors last year – those visitors spent just under half of what was spent in Dubai.

Almost 90% of visitors to Dubai travelled there on leisure rather than business, and it would appear that a significant part of that leisure time is spent shopping.

Visitors to Dubai spent 31% of their total expenditure on shopping, even more than was spent on accommodation, which accounted for 29% of the total.

Compare that to Paris, where visitors spent 45% of their budget on accommodation and just 16.6% on shopping. In New York visitors spent 31.8% on accommodation and 21.4% on shopping.

Growth in international travel and spending has far outperformed growth in GDP.

Since 2009, the world’s real GDP, as measured by the IMF’s World Economic Outlook, has grown by 21.8% in real terms.

But the total number of overnight visitors increased by 55.2% and their spending increased by 41.1%, over the same period.

Amongst emerging travel hotspots, Osaka in Japan is the world’s fastest growing destination. Bucharest is the fastest growing destination in Europe and Miami in holds the honour in North America.

Amongst the world’s top 10 destination cities, only New York is forecast to have a small drop in visitor numbers in 2017.
Source: These are the cities where visitors spend the most cash | World Economic Forum