Int'l tourists to Cambodia up 114 pct in Q1: official

Phnom Penh (Cambodia), April 2: Cambodia received a total of 151,680 foreign visitors in the first quarter of 2022, an increase of 114 percent from 70,901 arrivals recorded in the same period last year, a senior tourism official said on Friday.
Kong Sopheareak, director of Tourism Statistics Department at the Ministry of Tourism, said that of the total, 86,588 tourists arrived in the Southeast Asian country by air during the January-March period, up 158 percent year-on-year.
"Neighboring Vietnam topped the chart of the international tourist arrivals to Cambodia, followed by Thailand and China," he told Xinhua.
"During the first quarter of this year, there were 1,012 flights to capital Phnom Penh, 144 flights to Siem Reap province and 55 flights to Preah Sihanouk province," he said.
Sopheareak said the sharp rise in the number of foreign visitors came after the country fully resumed its socio-economic activities and reopened its borders to fully vaccinated travelers without quarantine since the middle of November last year following most of its 16 million population having been vaccinated against COVID-19.
Most of the vaccines used in the country's immunization program are China's Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines.
"With our quarantine free policy, we're confident that tourists will consider Cambodia as a key destination for their vacations and we hope to attract between 600,000 and 700,000 international tourists in 2022, an expected rise from only 200,000 in 2021," he said.
Meanwhile, Angkor Archaeological Park, the kingdom's most popular tourist destination, registered 19,840 foreign visitors in the first quarter of 2022, up 342 percent from 4,482 in the same period last year, the state-owned Angkor Enterprise said in a statement.
The park earned a gross revenue of 815,575 U.S. dollars from ticket sales during the January-March period, an increase of 340 percent from a year earlier, the statement said.
Located in the northwesternSiem Reap province, the Angkor Archaeological Park was inscribed on the World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1992.
Tourism is one of the four pillars supporting Cambodia's economy. The country attracted up to 6.61 million international tourists in 2019, generating a gross revenue of 4.92 billion U.S. dollars, according to the Ministry of Tourism.
Source: Xinhua