I remember reading that Vegas gets somewhere around 37 million visitors a year, surpassing Mecca as the most visited place on earth. Try googling, Vegas Mecca Most Visited.

Agree that it's difficult to define "visit" You can't really rely on airplane or rail statistics because man of those travelers are coming "home" and thus not "visiting". And, it would be very difficult to estimate the number of visitors arriving at a place via automobile or on foot.

I imagine that the best you can do is figure out the number of hotel rooms, or any type of temporary lodging for that matter (campgrounds, hostels, B&Bs, whatever), get some numbers for occupancy rates, and use that as a basis for determining visitors. Of course, this precludes daytrippers.

This list appears several places online, but the link it's supposed to come from

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0198352.html

doesn't have it by cities

World cities in 2006
1. Paris, France
2. Barcelona, Spain
3. NYC, USA
4. Beijing, China
5. Rome, Italy
6. London, England
7. Mexico City, Mexico
8. Istanbul, Turkey
9. Frankfurt, Germany
10. Moscow, Russia
11. Vienna, Austria
12. Toronto, Canada
13. Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
14. Kiev, Ukraine
15. Warsaw, Poland
16. Hong Kong, China
17. Athens, Greece
18. Budapest, Hungary
19. Bangkok, Thailand
20. Lisbon, Portugal

That was my first thought, but I saw somewhere that only 3m or so pilgrims make that journey per year. It has so much more importance in their lives than a casual holiday in Paris, but I was surprised that their numbers weren't much larger.

Kiev sees more visitors than HK? Now that's a stunning list!

Good link. It's not the actual source, though. If you note, they cite statistics from the World Tourism Organization. Here's a link to the WTO's statistics page:

http://www.world-tourism.org/facts/menu.html

It's not bad - they even have breakdowns by type of transport - air, water, land.

Thanks Mike,

Can I ask where you got the cities from though. I also found that list of countries, but haven't been able to find this list of cities that you posted anywhere. Did you just add the most likely city to the country?