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Paris, France, is the world's most popular tourist destination. As this article from the Salt Lake Tribune attests, over 76 million foreigners visited France in 2002. And this piece from Business Traveler Online states that over 16 million of those foreigners visited Paris. Paris and its surrounding suburbs, known as the Ile-de-France, boast a population of roughly 10.5 million people. Just over two million of those live in Paris proper. At the Paris Guide on Yahoo! Travel, we
learned that the three most popular tourist attractions are Disneyland Paris (12 million visitors last year), the Eiffel Tower (5.5 million), and the Louvre (5 million). InfoPlease features a handy table of world tourism statistics. The top five destinations (in order) are France, Spain, the United States, Italy, and China. For American visitors, the top five destinations are Mexico, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Finally, the World Tourism Organization presents this piece on tourism in 2002 that offers some cautiously optimistic statistics. For the first time in history,
the number of travelers last year exceeded 700 million people. While Europe remains in first place, Asia claimed the number two spot over the Americas.
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