
This MasterCard index is important because provides insight into the motivations and travel spend of visitors. Tourism is an important sector when it comes to promoting economic growth. In a bid to promote economic growth, most governments in Africa are continuously seeking ways to drive diversification as part of their growth strategies. This Index and the accompanying reports are not based on MasterCard volumes or transactional data. Public data is used in deriving the international overnight visitor arrivals and their cross-border spending in each of the 132 destination cities. This gives visitor and passenger growth forecasts for 2017.

The MasterCard Global Destination index ranks cities in terms of the number of their total international visitor arrivals and the cross-border spending by these same visitors in the destination cities in 2016.
