The number of foreign tourists visiting Siem Reap, home of the Kingdom’s iconic Angkor Wat temples, in 2011 is expected to have jumped 23 per cent year-on-year, according to provincial tourism officials.

Foreign tourists to the province totalled 1.4 million through November, or 100,000 more than visited in all of 2010, Ngov Sengkak, director of the Ministry of Tourism’s provincial office in Siem Reap, said.

“The final count will reach 1.6 million, because more visitors will be coming to celebrate the New Year at Angkor Wat,” he said.

Ngov Sengkak said the Ministry of Tourism, in conjunction with the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, was promoting a number of cultural events in Siem Reap for the New Year holiday to attract more visitors to the area.

He confirmed that most big hotels in Siem Reap city were full, but small hotels and guesthouses still offered vacancies.

Siem Reap province had 138 hotels, with a total of 10,407 rooms, and 232 guesthouses with a total of 3,242 rooms, he said.

A total of 1.2 million tourists visited Angkor Wat through November, according to Ngov Sengkak. Many of them also visited Tonle Sap lake and other destinations nearby.

Vietnamese tourists continued to enter the Kingdom in the greatest numbers, he said. They accounted for about 239,000 of total visitors through November, an increase of 40 per cent year-on-year, ministry data shows.

Vietnamese tourists represented 16.6 per cent of all visitors to Cambodia during the period.

South Koreans ranked second with about 233,000, or 16.2 per cent of all visitors through November . That figure represented a 33 per cent year-on-year increase.

Japanese and Thai tourists fell far behind with 107,000 and 34,000 visitors, respectively, for the period.