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There's always lists on the most popular countries. But in my travels, I've found going against the grain has been super rewarding - places like Chernobyl, in Ukraine, or the desert of Uzbekistan or the mountains of Tajikistan have been some of my travelling highlights.

Then reading a mostly fluff piece on the least visited places in the world made me wonder - and I'll need statistics to back this up please, which country has the fewest TOURISTS (that's people from other countries coming to this country for tourism) every year?

Three caveats:

  • Antarctica is not a country (for the purpose of this)
  • All the soldiers entering Iraq / Afghanistan do not count as tourists
  • since countries come and go, ideally this would simply be the most recent statistics we can find, which is likely to be '2011' statistics.
Mark Mayo
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8 Answers8

39

Probably Somalia. In 2010, there was a Canadian man who disembarked from his plane in Mogadishu claiming to be a tourist, and the officials were in such disbelief that Somalia had a tourist that they detained him and it made the news.

An immigration official is quoted as saying that the Canadian was “the first person to come to Mogadishu only for tourism".

About a decade ago, the Economist interviewed the minister of tourism of Somalia who said “I'm sure tourists would leave Somalia alive and I'm hopeful they wouldn't be kidnapped. At least, we would try to make sure they were not kidnapped, although it can happen.” Hardly a ringing advertisement for their tourism industry!

Unfortunately, I don't know if Mogadishu has had a tourist since the Canadian two years ago, nor do I have statistics for cities in Somalia outside of Mogadishu.

Chris Guillebeau did travel to Somaliland (which is the "safe" part of Somalia) for tourism in Dec 2011 and wrote an interesting blog post on his experience - didn't sound like many other tourists were going there from that.

GScott
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Gunnar Garfors has been researching this question on his blog.

He's found that the UNWTO, World Tourism Organization has a good overview of them.

Essentially, as of 2019 (right before COVID), at the tail end of the tourism list are:

Country Visitors (thousands)
TUVALU 3.7
MARSHALL ISLANDS 9.2
NIUE 11.6
MONTSERRAT 19.3
SABA 28.6
SOLOMON ISLANDS 28.9
MAURITANIA 30
SINT EUSTATIUS 30
SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE 34.9
MICRONESIA, FEDERATED STATES OF 47.5

Additionally the following countries have no data and presumably don't get much tourism either:

  1. AFGHANISTAN

  2. EQUATORIAL GUINEA

  3. NORTH KOREA

  4. LIBERIA

  5. NAURU

  6. SOMALIA

  7. SOUTH SUDAN

Oddly, I tried to go to Nauru in 2006, but couldn't find flights that worked, so went to Tonga instead :/

JonathanReez
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Mark Mayo
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10

North Korea. Very few people go there. There's only one offical tour company.

Amandasaurus
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There is a somewhat relevant list for that.

I only found this PDF linked on from wikipedia with solid numbers, but they never show the raw data; a Top50 by arrivals or by tourist spending is all they offer.

Another source for this data seems to be http://www.ipkinternational.com/ - but you have to purchase the records. Wolfram alpha has no data for this query.

iHaveacomputer
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4

My understanding is that Saudi Arabia does not permit tourists, period.

Thus, depending on how you count those making a religious pilgrimage (I forget what it's called) to Mecca the count might be zero, putting them at the bottom of the list.

Loren Pechtel
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From a UK perspective the Foreign Travel Advice provided by the British Government have published the numbers of British Citizens to various countries per annum in 2014. Wikipedia

According to this list Kiribati is the least visited country by British citizens in 2014 with just 78 recorded visitors. However the citation on Wikipedia only references the gov.uk website and not an actual published document and it does not differentiate the difference between tourist and business visitor.

medina
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In 2010 40,873 tourists visited Bhutan.

Source

greg121
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1

Someone requested a per-capita statistic, so I've used UNWTO data combined with UN's latest population estimates to arrive at the top-10 least visited nations:

# Country Visitors/thousand residents Peak visitors/year (thousands)
1 Somalia 0.06 1
2 Afghanistan 0.49 20
3 South Sudan 0.92 10
4 Bangladesh 2.73 467
5 D.R. Congo 3.58 354
6 North Korea 3.84 100
7 Liberia 4.53 24
8 Pakistan 4.92 1161
9 Equatorial Guinea 5.99 10
10 Mauritania 6.33 30

We can also derive the top-10 most visited nations on a per-capita basis:

# Country Visitors/thousand residents Peak visitors/year (thousands)
1 San Marino 67933 2038
2 Saint Kitts And Nevis 25560 1278
3 Aruba 17736 1951
4 Bahamas 17683 7250
5 Antigua and Barbuda 11822 1064
6 Brunei Darussalam 10047 4521
7 Monaco 9075 363
8 Dominica 8686 608
9 Cook Islands 8600 172
10 Bahrain 8194 12045

Interestingly on a per-capita basis little Nauru actually has as many tourists as the UK (at least pre-COVID).

JonathanReez
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