The latest data released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics on overseas arrivals and departures shows new emerging tourism trends for Australia.
Short-term visitor arrivals are rising, with 7,032,100 short-term arrivals to Australia over the 12 months to March 2015, and a growth rate of 8% over the year.
Meanwhile, short-term departures for activities such as overseas holidays or business trips are much greater than arrivals at 9,218,900 over the past year, but the rate of growth is much slower at 4.5% over the past year.
CoreLogic RP Data research analyst
Cameron Kusher notes that the data is a positive sign for domestic tourism with the ratio of short-term overseas departures to every short-term arrival over the past 12 months at its lowest level since August 2011, at 1.31.
New Zealand, China, UK, Singapore and USA together accounted for 53.3% of all short-term arrivals in the country, with China now the second largest source of arrivals to Australia as UK arrivals have slowed.
20 years ago China ranked 19
th in the top source of arrivals at just 0.9% of all arrivals and Kusher says the data suggests that Chinese tourism to Australia is likely to continue to grow.
“With a lower Australian dollar tourism authorities will be hoping to attract even more tourists to the country over the coming year. Furthermore, they will also be hoping that more Australians decide to holiday domestically which would provide a further boost to the tourism sector,” Kusher said.
