The Asia-Pacific Tourism Exchange Center (APTEC) is a new foundation that was established in September 1995. Its purpose is to support the activities of the World Tourism Organization's (WTO) Regional Support Office for Asia and the Pacific and organize a variety of activities related to tourism exchange with countries in the Asia-Pacific region. APTEC is also a response to growing demands for increased contributions from Japan to the international community. One of APTEC 's main activities is compiling. analyzing and supplying world tourism-related statistics that are of vital interest to marketing strategies in the tourism industry to prepare for the 21st century.

　 APTEC provides support for WTO. the world's largest international organization devoted to tourism promotion. To help promote the development of tourism, WTO compiles basic statistics based on a wealth of data gathered from its member countries and conducts wide-ranging forecasts on the future of world tourism, WTO has a high reputation for its reliability and usefulness of its data for statistical and marketing activities.

　 From the beginning, APTEC studied the possibility of making these WTO statistics widely available to those interested in tourism. Fortunately we have obtained WTO 's approval to publish this data in the form of "WORLD TOURISM STATISTICS."

　 The statistics contained in this publication are unprecedented and we believe that they are extremely valuable. The data features outbound tourist trends organized by major generating countries, destinations and periods. This achievement is made possible by WTO and its many years of experience and knowhow. It is an honor and the greatest pleasure for all of us at APTEC to be able to publish this data as a memorable project of our organization. We sincerely hope that those in tourism promotion, tourism industry, researchers, and the general public will make full use of this publication as a basic data resource guide of world tourism trends.

　 In conclusion, we would like to express our thanks to the Nippon Foundation for its support for this publication.