The first decade of the present century has been characterized by several economic shocks such as the 2008 financial crisis. In this data article we present the annual percentage growth rates of the main tourism indicators in the world׳s top tourist destinations: the United States, China, France, Spain, Italy, United Kingdom, Germany, Turkey, Mexico and Austria. We use data from the Compendium of Tourism Statistics provided by the World Tourism Organization (http://www2.unwto.org/content/data-0). It has been demonstrated that the dynamics of growth in the tourism industry pose different challenges to each destination in the previous study "Positioning and clustering of the world׳s top tourist destinations by means of dimensionality reduction techniques for categorical data" (Claveria and Poluzzi, 2016, [1]). We provide a descriptive analysis of the variables over the period comprised between 2000 and 2010. We complement the analysis by graphing the evolution of the main variables so as to visually represent the co-movements between tourism variables and economic growth.