The Mastercard-CrescentRating Global Muslim Travel Index (GMTI) 2018, which covers 130 destinations, saw Malaysia retain the premier spot while Indonesia built on its year-on-year growth by moving up to joint second with the United Arab Emirates in the overall rankings.
Malaysia and Singapore have kept their position as the number one destinations in the global Muslim travel market as rivals are looking to close the gap fast, according to the annual research on the sector.
The Mastercard-CrescentRating Global Muslim Travel Index (GMTI) 2018, which covers 130 destinations, saw Malaysia retain the premier spot while Indonesia built on its year-on-year growth by moving up to joint second with the United Arab Emirates in the overall rankings.
The Index also reveals that a number of non-Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) destinations in Asia moved up the rankings - a result of their concerted effort to adapt their services to cater to and attract the Muslim travel market.
Singapore retained its pole position for the non-OIC destination markets, ahead of Thailand and the United Kingdom, while Japan and Taiwan surged into the top five for the first time since the GMTI was released.
The GMTI 2018, launched in Jakarta, confirmed the Muslim travel market is on course to continue its fast-paced growth to reach US$220 billion in 2020. It is expected to grow a further US$80 billion to hit US$300 billion by 2026.
In 2017, there were an estimated 131 million Muslim visitor arrivals globally - up from 121 million in 2016 - and this is forecasted to grow to 156 million visitors by 2020 representing 10% of the travel segment.
“We are now starting to see the impact of investment and commitment by destinations across the world into the Muslim travel market which is reaping rewards including a real shift in the rankings,” said Fazal Bahardeen, CEO of CrescentRating and HalalTrip.
It is estimated the ASEAN region will welcome over 18 million Muslim visitor arrivals by 2020, representing close to 15% of the visitor arrivals to the region.
All 130 destinations in the GMTI2018 have been scored against a backdrop of criteria with some new metrics added for this year’s research including the CrescentRating Growth-Innovation Model.
Key metric criteria included access which rates infrastructure; communications and looking at how destinations market themselves to a target audience; environment and services. Each criterion is then weighted to make up the overall index score.