Over 1m Chinese tourists to visit NY in 2018

Annual Chinese visitor numbers for New York are expected to exceed 1 million by 2018, according to NYC & Co, the city's official destination marketing organization.

New York welcomed a record 958,000 visitors from the Chinese mainland last year, according to statistics by NYC & Co, a 10 percent increase over the previous year, making China its second-largest source of tourists after Canada.

"Since 2010, Chinese visitation to New York City has grown vigorously from 229,000 visitors to 870,000 in 2015, which was an impressive 280 percent increase," said Makiko Matsuda Healy, senior vice-president of NYC & Co, in a recent written interview.