The world's least-visited countries: how few tourists reach Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands

International tourism reached a new high of 1.133 billion trips in 2014, up 4.3% on the 1.087 billion recorded the year before, according to the UN World Tourism Organization. But the same organization's country-by-country breakdown, covering the 2013 calendar year, shows how unevenly that total was shared: a small cluster of remote states recorded international arrivals in the low thousands, while France alone welcomed tens of millions.

Each year the UNWTO publishes Tourism Highlights, compiling international arrivals reported by national tourism authorities for around 190 destinations. The 2015 edition — the one behind the rankings below — reports 2013 arrivals at the country level alongside a preliminary global total for 2014, which is why the world figure above and the country-level figures that follow come from two adjoining but different years.

The gap between busiest and quietest

France topped the UNWTO's 2013 table with 83.6 million arrivals, ahead of the United States on 69.9 million and Spain on 60.6 million. At the opposite end of the same table sat Kiribati, with about 6,000 arrivals; the Marshall Islands, with about 5,000; and Tuvalu, with just 1,000 — the lowest figure the UNWTO recorded for any destination that year.

France's 83.6 million arrivals in 2013 were more than 83,000 times Tuvalu's total for the same year — the widest gap anywhere in the UNWTO's country rankings.

Where the count drops to four figures

Tuvalu's total was the extreme case, but it was far from alone. Niue and Montserrat each recorded about 7,000 arrivals in 2013; American Samoa, about 20,000; and the Solomon Islands, about 24,000. Nineteen destinations in total reported fewer than 100,000 arrivals that year, and 91 — roughly two in five of the destinations the UNWTO tracks — recorded fewer than 1 million.

• Tuvalu — about 1,000 arrivals
• Marshall Islands — about 5,000
• Kiribati — about 6,000
• Niue and Montserrat — about 7,000 each
• American Samoa — about 20,000
• Solomon Islands — about 24,000

Some of this is simply arithmetic. Tuvalu has a land area of about 26 square kilometres and a population under 11,000; Nauru covers about 21 square kilometres. Absorbing tens of thousands of extra visitors a year — let alone millions — would strain infrastructure built for a resident population that small, long before any question of appeal comes into it.

A second, independent count

The UNWTO's table isn't the only attempt to rank the least-visited countries. In 2015, Norwegian travel writer Gunnar Garfors published his own list of the 25 least-visited countries, drawing on a broader mix of national tourism-board data. His count put Nauru lowest of all, at about 160 visitors, ahead of Somalia (400) and Tuvalu (1,200). Those figures sit outside the UNWTO's official table and are harder to independently verify, but they agree with the UNWTO's data on the broad picture — Kiribati and the Marshall Islands come out in a similar range in both counts — and on which kind of place sits at the bottom: small, hard-to-reach states, several of them Pacific islands.

Nauru's case is particularly stark. The eight-square-mile island's economy was built around phosphate mining, which left little room for a hospitality sector to develop, and in recent decades it has hosted an Australian-funded regional processing centre rather than a visitor industry. That's a very different economic path from nearby Pacific destinations such as Fiji, which built its arrivals into the hundreds of thousands over the same period by investing directly in resorts and flight capacity.

Why so few tourists reach these places

The common thread across nearly every country on this list is access, not appeal. Tuvalu's only scheduled service is a propeller flight from Fiji, arriving about twice a week. Niue has historically had roughly one flight a week from Auckland, and Nauru has long relied on a single weekly service. Kiribati and the Marshall Islands are reachable on slightly more frequent island-hopper routes — Kiribati via Fiji, the Marshall Islands via a multi-stop service from Honolulu — but both still measure their weekly capacity in single flights, not the multiple daily departures that feed high-arrival destinations.

• Twice-weekly propeller flights (Tuvalu)
• Historically single weekly connections (Nauru, Niue)
• No runway built for wide-body jets
• Small resident populations to support hotels, guides and onward transport

Has the ranking changed since 2013?

Not by much. Tuvalu's own count had risen to roughly 2,000 arrivals a year by the UNWTO's International Tourism Highlights, 2019 Edition — still one of the lowest of any recognized destination. Later independent estimates for the Marshall Islands and Kiribati put both in a similar few-thousand-a-year range through the early 2020s. The names at the bottom of the list, and the reasons they're there, have stayed remarkably consistent for a decade.

For most travellers, the lesson isn't that these countries are unwelcoming — it's that reaching them takes deliberate planning around a schedule measured in flights per week, not per day. That scarcity of onward transport, more than any lack of interest, is what keeps the arrivals count in four figures rather than four million.

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