5 Charts That Show Why the Travel Industry Is the World’s Fastest Growing Sector

The global travel and tourism sector employs more people than automotive manufacturing, mining, and financial services combined globally, according to new research from the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC).

We’ve extracted five charts from its Benchmarking Report 2015, which compares travel and tourism to eight other sectors that are considered to have similar breadth and global presence, across 26 countries. Here they are, below:

At nearly $2.4 trillion in 2014, travel and tourism’s direct industry gross domestic product (GDP) represents nearly 3.1% of global GDP and is larger than the chemicals manufacturing and automotive manufacturing sectors.

With 105 million people directly employed in 2014, travel and tourism directly employs:

• 7 times more than automotive manufacturing
• 5 times more than the global chemicals industry
• 4 times more than the global banking industry
• 4 times more than the global mining industry
• Almost 2 times more than the global financial services industry.

Travel and tourism directly sustains more jobs than the automotive and chemicals manufacturing industries combined across every region of the world. In Asia, there are more than eight times as many travel and tourism jobs as auto manufacturing jobs and nearly five times as many chemicals manufacturing jobs.

The Oxford Economics global industry model projects travel and tourism direct industry GDP to grow 3.9 percent per annum (compound annual growth) over the next decade. This is greater growth than forecast for every sector studied in this research except for retail.

More than half of all service exports are generated by travel and tourism in Spain, Malaysia, the UAE, South Africa, Peru, Mexico, Thailand, Turkey, and Jamaica.