BANGKOK, 3 January 2024: TAT suffered a memory lapse when it posted what was supposed to be Mastercard’s latest Global Destination Cities Index, placing Bangkok at the top of the pile with 22.78 million visitors in 2023.
It turned out to be a rerun of the Mastercard’s index for 2019, covering data collected in 2018. The Tourism Authority of Thailand correctly posted the Mastercard index findings on its news website on 10 September 2019. So how did the same index findings get resurrected in December 2023 and floated on the TAT Facebook page masquerading as the gospel truth? Has something gone wrong with TAT’s newsroom’s fact-checking?
‘Home for human stories’ Medium.com was apparently the first culprit to resurrect the 2019 index data to an imaginary 2023 Mastercard index release. TAT then appears to have picked it up without fact-checking or even looking back through its own newsroom archives, where it would have discovered it had successfully covered the story four years earlier.
The Mastercard Global Destination Cities Index dropped out of sight since the 2019 edition for obvious reasons — the pandemic and its devastating aftermath. But in the good times, Mastercard typically releases the new index sometime in the first half of the calendar year, usually between April and June.
We can expect Mastercard to return with its destination cities index in mid-2024. For the record, the 2019 index is shown below.
