What is the LEAST visited country by tourists?
There's always lists on the most popular countries. But in my travels, I've found going against the grain has been super rewarding - places like Chernobyl, in Ukraine, or the desert of Uzbekistan or the mountains of Tajikistan have been some of my travelling highlights.
Then reading a mostly fluff piece on the least visited places in the world made me wonder - and I'll need statistics to back this up please, which country has the fewest TOURISTS (that's people from other countries coming to this country for tourism) every year?
Three caveats:
- Antarctica is not a country (for the purpose of this)
- All the soldiers entering Iraq / Afghanistan do not count as tourists
- since countries come and go, ideally this would simply be the most recent statistics we can find, which is likely to be '2011' statistics.
Best Answer
Probably Somalia. In 2010, there was a Canadian man who disembarked from his plane in Mogadishu claiming to be a tourist, and the officials were in such disbelief that Somalia had a tourist that they detained him and it made the news.
An immigration official is quoted as saying that the Canadian was “the first person to come to Mogadishu only for tourism".
About a decade ago, the Economist interviewed the minister of tourism of Somalia who said “I'm sure tourists would leave Somalia alive and I'm hopeful they wouldn't be kidnapped. At least, we would try to make sure they were not kidnapped, although it can happen.” Hardly a ringing advertisement for their tourism industry!
Unfortunately, I don't know if Mogadishu has had a tourist since the Canadian two years ago, nor do I have statistics for cities in Somalia outside of Mogadishu.
Chris Guillebeau did travel to Somaliland (which is the "safe" part of Somalia) for tourism in Dec 2011 and wrote an interesting blog post on his experience - didn't sound like many other tourists were going there from that.
Pictures about "What is the LEAST visited country by tourists?"
What are the 10 least visited countries in the world?
Ten Least Visited Countries in the World and How to Visit Them- 8 \u2013 Libya 6250 Visitors. ...
- 7 \u2013 Marshall Islands 6000 Visitors. ...
- 6 \u2013 Equatorial Guinea 5700 Visitors. ...
- 5 \u2013 South Sudan 5500 Visitors. ...
- 4 \u2013 Kiribati 4000 visitors. ...
- 3 \u2013 Tuvalu 2000 visitors. ...
- 2 \u2013 Somalia 1000 visitors. ...
- 1 \u2013 Republic of Nauru 200 visitors.
Traveling to the Least Visited Country in the World
More answers regarding what is the LEAST visited country by tourists?
Answer 2
North Korea. Very few people go there. There's only one offical tour company.
Answer 3
There is a somewhat relevant list for that.
I only found this PDF linked on from wikipedia with solid numbers, but they never show the raw data; a Top50 by arrivals or by tourist spending is all they offer.
Another source for this data seems to be http://www.ipkinternational.com/ - but you have to purchase the records. Wolfram alpha has no data for this query.
Answer 4
My understanding is that Saudi Arabia does not permit tourists, period.
Thus, depending on how you count those making a religious pilgrimage (I forget what it's called) to Mecca the count might be zero, putting them at the bottom of the list.
Answer 5
Answer 6
From a UK perspective the Foreign Travel Advice provided by the British Government have published the numbers of British Citizens to various countries per annum in 2014. Wikipedia
According to this list Kiribati is the least visited country by British citizens in 2014 with just 78 recorded visitors. However the citation on Wikipedia only references the gov.uk website and not an actual published document and it does not differentiate the difference between tourist and business visitor.
Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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