Australia investment in tourism towards Asia is paying off as more travellers from the continent are coming down under, said Australia Minister of Tourism Martin Ferguson.
CANBERRA- The figures of international arrivals and Departures show investment to attract tourism from Asia to Australia is well working, said Australia’s Minister for Tourism Martin Ferguson in a statement last week.
According to the figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, recent increases in flights to Australia of key Asian airlines such as China Southern and Sichuan Airlines has increased 3.5% to 6 million international arrivals in the last twelve months.
“We have allocated 48.5 million U.S. dollars to the Asia Marketing Fund to help ensure Australia is the destination of choice and these figures show that this money is well spent,” Ferguson said.
Arrivals from China, the second largest market by volume and largest by value, continues to grow at record levels, up 16.6% in August to almost 427,000 for the calendar year to date.
Arrivals from Hong Kong increased 18.3% while that from Japan, recovering from last year’s tsunami, was up 6.0% for the month and 7.1% for the year.
Last June, Tourism Australia unveils a new strategy aimed at tapping into the future tourism potential of India. Tourism Australia said the India 2020 Strategic Plan had been developed to attract a great share of the 50 million Indians expected to travel overseas by 2020. The agency indicates that India is currently Australia’s 10th most valuable inbound tourism market, with 148,000 visitors spending 867 million AU dollars (868.71 million U.S. dollars) in 2011. By 2020, this number could have increased to 300,000 Indian visitors spending on average 2.3 billion AU dollars (2.4 billion U.S. dollars).
