Cambodia sees sharp increase in foreign tourists in January-April

This picture taken on April 8, 2022 shows tourists visiting the Angkor Wat temple complex, a Unesco World Heritage Site, in Siem Reap province. - AFP

PHNOM PENH (Xinhua): Cambodia attracted a total of 241,485 international visitors in the first four months of this year, up 191 per cent from the same period last year, said the latest report released by the Ministry of Tourism on Thursday (June 2).

Some 131,864 or 54.6 per cent of the tourists arrived in the South-East Asian country by air during the January-April period, up 244 per cent year-on-year, the report said, adding that neighbouring Vietnam topped the chart of the international tourist arrivals to the kingdom, followed by Thailand and China.

Kong Sopheareak, director of the tourism ministry's statistics department, attributed the significant rise to the country's full reopening buoyed by high vaccination rates.

"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 800,000 and 1 million international tourists in 2022, an expected increase from only 200,000 in 2021," he told Xinhua.

Tourism is one of the four pillars supporting the kingdom's economy. In the pre-pandemic era, the country attracted up to 6.6 million international tourists in 2019, generating a gross revenue of US$4.92 billion, according to the tourism ministry.

Cambodia has fully resumed its social and economic activities and reopened its borders to fully vaccinated travelers without quarantine since November last year after most of its 16 million population had been vaccinated against Covid-19.

Most of the Covid-19 vaccines used in Cambodia's immunisation programmes have been China's Sinovac and Sinopharm vaccines.

According to the Ministry of Health, Cambodia has recorded no new cases of Covid-19 for the past 26 days, and currently only three active cases remain in the country.