Tourism’s Growth Numbers Don’t Tell You Who Grew With It

The industry has never had more data. It still can’t answer its most basic question.

Tourism doesn’t have a numbers shortage.

It has the opposite problem. An abundance of numbers, all pointing the same direction, while the question underneath them sits there, mostly unasked.

In 2025, Travel & Tourism contributed a record US$11.6 trillion to the global economy, 9.8% of world GDP, and supported 366 million jobs worldwide, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC)’s latest Economic Impact Research. International visitor spending reached US$2.02 trillion, its first year above pre-pandemic levels. UN Tourism’s January 2026 barometer puts international arrivals at 1.523 billion, provisionally, with tourism export revenues, including passenger transport, at roughly US$2.2 trillion. Every one of those figures tells us something important. None of them says who grew with the industry.

Growth is Not the Same as Distribution

A destination can post record arrivals without a matching rise in locally owned businesses. Record receipts without incomes rising for the people who live closest to the attraction. More jobs without more secure ones. More investment without residents having much real say over what that investment changes.

That’s not an argument against growth. The World Bank frames tourism as one of the more inclusive and scalable engines of job creation available to developing economies, connecting global demand to local suppliers across hospitality, transport, food systems and retail. But its own analysis is careful to add that the benefits aren’t automatic. Without coordinated destination management and stronger governance, tourism can just as easily underperform or create pressure on the places it depends on. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says something close to the same thing from the policy side. Its Tourism Trends and Policies 2026 report carries an entire chapter, Enhancing the social benefits of tourism, built around the fact that tourism’s gains are not evenly distributed, and around what stronger local governance would need to look like to change that.

Two organisations, working independently, landing in the same place. Growth and benefit aren’t the same variable.

Governance Decides More than Leakage Does

Ask why a destination’s tourism can grow for a decade without the community growing alongside it, and leakage is almost always the first answer offered. Money flows out through foreign-owned platforms, imported supply chains, commissions paid to intermediaries who never set foot in the place. Leakage is real. It’s also the easiest part of the story to measure, which is probably why it dominates the conversation and crowds out the harder question sitting underneath it.

A tourism business can be locally registered, majority-owned by residents on paper, and still generate almost no local benefit if its procurement runs elsewhere, its best-paid roles go to outsiders, or its profits never reach the people whose land or culture the business is actually selling. Money staying inside a country’s borders is not the same as money reaching the community standing next to the attraction.

The deeper question, the one that rarely makes it into a report, is who was in the room when that business was licensed, that concession awarded, that masterplan approved. It rarely looks like exclusion from the outside. It looks like a strategy document written in a language most residents don’t read fluently. A stakeholder meeting scheduled on a weekday morning that only salaried staff can attend. A “consultation” held after the plan is already drafted and funded, where the only real choice on the table is whether to accept it. None of that requires bad intentions from anyone involved. It just requires nobody to have asked who was missing from the room, and by the time somebody notices, the plan is already moving.

A community with a genuine seat at that table has more opportunity to shape the terms: local sourcing requirements, employment conditions, a real share of concession revenue. A community without a seat has no lever to pull, no matter how the money happens to be flowing that year. Leakage is what shows up on a spreadsheet. Governance is why the spreadsheet looks the way it does.

What the Jobs Number Hides

Employment is the figure tourism leans on hardest, which is exactly why it deserves the most scrutiny.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that over 230 million workers are employed in tourism industries globally, around 7.2% of the global workforce. A separate part of that same analysis, published in 2023, found that when indirect employment was included, roughly one in ten jobs worldwide was linked to tourism, as of 2019. Worth keeping those two figures apart rather than treating them as one current number, since they’re measuring different things at different points in time.

What the ILO’s sectoral work is less flattering about is the character of much of that employment: high informality, long and variable hours, wages below the economy-wide average, weak social protection, and a persistent gender pay gap tied to occupational segregation and reduced hours for the women who make up 60 to 70% of the hotel, catering and tourism workforce. Youth and migrant workers cluster in the least secure tiers.

A jobs count answers one question. Whether those jobs are formal, seasonal, or a route to ownership rather than a dead end, it doesn’t touch at all.

Tourism also happens to people who never work in it. Teachers, farmers, fishers, shopkeepers, healthcare workers, children who will never draw a salary from the sector but who live with everything it brings, the funded road as much as the strained water supply.

Better Questions than How Much Growth

None of this argues for abandoning the counting. Arrivals, receipts and employment figures are genuinely useful, and no serious destination strategy would throw them out.

It argues for building alongside them. UN Tourism’s Statistical Framework for Measuring the Sustainability of Tourism (SF-MST), endorsed by the United Nations Statistical Commission (UNSC) in 2024, already gives destinations an internationally agreed structure for tracking the economic, environmental and social dimensions of tourism together, rather than treating GDP contribution as the whole story. The framework exists. The real question is how extensively destinations choose to use it, and what they’re willing to let it change about what they count as success.

What it points toward, in practice, is a shorter, more uncomfortable set of questions sitting next to the familiar ones. How much procurement is sourced locally. What share of jobs are permanent rather than seasonal. Whether local businesses are growing or merely surviving. Whether residents believe tourism is improving their lives, asked directly, rather than inferred from an index that never spoke to them.

Tourism will keep growing. Its own data confirms that clearly enough. The number worth asking for, before the next report lands, is the one the current dashboard was never built to produce: if this destination’s tourism kept growing exactly as it has for the next ten years, would the people who live there be the ones telling you it worked?