The number of overseas tourists visiting Australia dropped last year; however the continuing economic growth of India and China are expected to bounce back tourist levels to record highs.
Last year the strength of the Aussie dollar and high oil prices saw Australia's tourism numbers drop. A decline in aviation capacity and an increase in the number of low cost carrier routes in Asia also hit the market. According to the Federal Government's Tourism Forecast Committee, overseas arrivals in the first nine months of 2006 were down one per cent from the year before.
However industry and government say China and India, Australia's two fastest growing markets, will mean that tourism levels are predicted to increase by 4 per cent annually, reaching around 8.4 million in 2015. Responding to a strategic report on tourism's future in Australia, Federal Tourism Minister Fran Bailey announced a number of government initiatives last week to address the issue.
"The tourism industry needs to continually re-fresh its products, invest in innovation and attract tourists from emerging markets of China and India," Ms Bailey said.
While the Government has stopped short of increasing tourism funding, Ms Bailey said the Australian tourism industry needed to attract more "big spending" tourists and the Government, would be implementing initiatives to improve return for private sector investment. These include extending the working holiday visa scheme and developing a national approach to counter "unethical and undesirable" practices like commission shopping dependency and misleading information.
Tourism Australia's chairman Tim Fischer said Australia will open a new office in India in 2007, most likely in Mumbai, to take advantage of increasing tourism opportunities in the rapidly growing Indian market.
"The new office will allow Tourism Australia to build on existing marketing and PR activities, and will support the roll out of the "So Where the Bloody Hell Are You?" campaign, which launched on Indian TV this week," said Tim Fischer.
Mr Fischer said Tourism Australia already had a number of innovative marketing programmes in place in India, including a campaign to capture the growing honeymoon market.
Around 80,000 Indians visited Australia in 2005-2006, up 33 per cent on the year before. However, while the Indian market is expected to reach 550,000 tourists by 2025, China is considered to be Australia's largest source of visitors in the future.
Australia, along with New Zealand was the first western country to gain approval as a tourist destination for China's leisure travellers. According to a report on emerging markets for tourism, the numbers have been steadily growing since then, with annual growth expected to reach 16 per cent in the coming years.
Around 280,000 Chinese visited Australia in 2006 but the report, titled National Tourism Emerging Markets Strategy: China and India (EMS) predicts around one million Chinese will be visiting Australia annually by 2015.
The World Tourism Organisation estimates that by 2020, 100 million Chinese tourists will be on the move every year, and China will have become the fourth largest source of world travellers. While tour operators, shops, restaurant and hotel groups are salivating worldwide at the prospect and the Australian Government is looking to increase its $1.4 billion industry, a report form Europe suggests Chinese tourists are not necessarily big spenders. At the first Pan Europe China conference held last year, The World Travel and Tourist Council identified three main features of Chinese "outbound" travellers.
"They don't spend much, they want to visit as many destinations as they can in Europe and they want Europeans to respect them," the Council said in a statement.
According to the Economist the Chinese are big spenders but they are selective and only buy things they cannot obtain easily in China.
"Chinese tourists are champion shoppers who prefer to concentrate their spending on luxury branded goods, which are cheaper than back home and guaranteed not to be fakes," the magazine said. "In 2005 they spent more on shopping, per day and per trip, than travellers from Europe, Japan or America."
Chinese tourists visiting Australia are also considered thrifty but according to the EMS report they stay longer than other groups and so overall expenditure is 43 per cent higher than other nationalities.
The report said shopping was the most popular attraction for Chinese tourists in Australia while "visiting the beach" came in a close second.