Global Muslim Travel Index is announced every spring, and attracts great attention. Muslim-friendly destination ranking is supervised and presented by CrescentRating in Singapore and MasterCard Worldwide in the United States of America, calculated based on 11 evaluations with 130 countries and regions in the world as the subject.
What is characteristic about the 2016 result is the increase in score of non-OIC countries. Specifically, the average score of the top 20 OIC countries from 2015 to 2016 increased by 0.8 points from 65.8 66.6 points, but the score of the top 20 non-OIC countries increased by 2.6 from 47.7 to 50.3 in non-OIC countries. That is, preparation for a Muslim-friendly environment is advancing in non-Islam countries.
Malaysia was ranked number 1 overall, and Singapore was ranked number one in non-OIC countries (number 8 overall), and Japan was ranked number 8 (number 34 overall) in non-OIC countries, and took a spot in the Top 10 for the first time.
Hong Kong was ranked number 5, while Taiwan was ranked number 7 (both non-OIC countries) from East Asia at the highest ranking ever, making East Asia a very competitive marketplace.
When details of the evaluations are observed, although Japan is rated on its high concern with respect to Muslim travelers compared to Hong Kong and Taiwan, it is still inferior to these two areas due to problems such as requirement of visa and communication.
In order for Japan to aim for one of the Top 5 non-OIC countries as the next goal, it becomes important for Japan to cooperate with Singapore, Thai, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, which are a step ahead, and learn from their examples of success.
MasterCard-CrescentRating Global Muslim Travel Index 2016
http://newsroom.mastercard.com/asia-pacific/documents/report-mastercard-crescentrating-global-muslim-travel-index-2016/
