When Do Asian Tourists Come to Slovenia?

SURS just released the full tourist figures for 2019, and although we already published a summary we thought we’d dig a little deeper into the data, to find some other trends and points of interest, with the top 10 nations for the year shown below (and the full list at the end of the story).

*Other Asian countries includes all Asian nations other than China, Japan and South Korea

When looking at the monthly data for all foreign tourists, the first thing to note is the extreme seasonality of such visits. The lowest figure, 167,689, was for February, while the highest, 879,291, was in August, with June to September all months with more than a half a million arrivals.

Of course, given the habit of summer vacations, and the fact that most visitors are from Europe, this isn’t surprising. But what about places with other traditions? The data for North East Asia – China, S Korea and Japan – shows a different picture, as does that for Other Asian countries (such as India, which isn’t yet pulled out of the data on its own) .

Related: Chinese Tourism Booming in Slovenia, Ex-Yugo Nations

Looking at China alone and there are two peaks, either side of the August one for tourism in general, with a very off-trend spike in October. It’s much the same story elsewhere in Asia, as seen below in a chart for China, South Korea, Japan and “Other Asia”. All have peaks outside the high summer, in late spring and – with the exception of Japan – in autumn, too.

Combining all the numbers in the chart above gives the following for the whole of Asia.

This line can then be overlaid on the one for the whole world, producing the following image.

Finally, I took a look at the percentage of tourist arrivals from all of Asia by month, with it being 9.5% for the whole. There are two months where such tourists account for more than 15% of the total, in May (15.9%) and October (17.4%).

The data thus suggest that one way to reduce the seasonal nature of tourism in Slovenia, and the trade in related goods and services, would be to continue and extend efforts promote the country as a destination in Asia, as tourists from this region tend to avoid the peak summer months and arrive out of season. You can learn more and play around with the SURS data here.

The full list of nations and regions for which data on tourist arrivals in 2019 is available is shown below.