Sophie Loras looks at what Australian regional centres and cities are doing in readiness for the exponential growth in Chinese tourism numbers to Australia and what government and tourism bodies are doing to maintain it.
It is an ambitious target – to more than double the 2010 total tourism expenditure in Australia from the Chinese market of $3.6 billion to reach somewhere between $7.406 billion and $9.022 billion in total expenditure by 2020. Those are the figures being forecast by Tourism Australia for the next ten years. And if recently released overseas arrivals and departures data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics is anything to go by, the level of optimism may well be warranted.
The February figures show that the ongoing economic booms in Asia, and more directly, China, continued to buoy the Australian tourism industry in 2011, despite weaknesses in the economies of some of Australia’s traditional markets and the impact of global natural disasters.
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