Chinese visitors boost tourism in Australia
Photo Courtesy: scmp.com
The number of Chinese visitors to Australia has grown 13 per cent in a single year, latest data showed.
A record high 1.3 million Chinese people visited Australia in the 12 months to June 2018 as per the latest International Visitor Survey (IVS), released by Tourism Research Australia (TRA) on Friday 2nd November 2018.
During this period around 1.3 million tourists visited Australia, who spent 11.3 billion Australian dollars (8.1 billion U.S. dollars) in the country, which is 15 per cent more than that of the previous year.
According to the IVS, Chinese visitors accounted for 81 per cent of the growth in tourism spending for the year.
The total number of international visitors also shows a hike of 5 per cent, counting to 8.4 million, and the total spending was 42.5 billion Australian dollars (30.6 billion U.S. dollars), showing a growth of 6 per cent.
Chinese visitors spent an average of 8,692 Australian dollars (6,262 U.S. dollars) during their visit to Australia, almost double of the spent by other foreign visitors on average.
New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state and home of Sydney, was the most popular destination with 4.3 million international visitors spending 10.5 billion Australian dollars (7.58 billion U.S. dollars) in the state.
The island state of Tasmania shows an increase of 21 per cent in both visitors number and spending, depicting the biggest growth in the previous year.
However, Northern Territory (NT), could not achieve any progress in the number of visitors, despite their efforts to attract more Chinese to the state. In NT, the number of visitors fell by 7 per cent and the visitor spending dropped by 15 per cent.
The NT government in April launched direct flights from the territory to China for the first time in the form of a Donghai Airlines flight from Shenzhen to Darwin. However, the tourism gains derived from the new flight corridor have been offset by Malaysian Airlines, Air Asia Indonesia and Philippine Airlines abandoning the NT.w
