Tourism industry ‘won’t survive’ border closures: Sydney Airport chief

Sydney Airport’s CEO believes tourism operators hanging by a thread won’t survive if borders remain closed until September.

Sydney Airport CEO Geoff Culbert. Picture: Sam Ruttyn

The boss of the nation’s biggest airport has urged for the rapid opening of state borders, warning that many tourism operators were hanging by a thread.

The first step towards reinvigorating the tourism industry was resuming domestic travel, said Sydney Airport chief executive Geoff Culbert.

Mr Culbert implored state governments to heed the chief medical officer’s advice. Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Tasmania have all refused to commit to a July reopening of borders, with Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk suggesting September was more realistic.

“If the health officials are telling us it’s safe to travel interstate then we shouldn’t be wasting any time getting people back to travel and we certainly shouldn’t be missing the opportunity of the July school holidays,” Mr Culbert said.

“If you miss the July holidays you really don’t get another shot at it until the September school holidays and a lot of people in the tourism industry may not survive the next three to four months. Once those jobs go they may be lost forever.”

Speaking to The Weekend Australian after the airport operator’s annual shareholder meeting, Mr Culbert said now that the worst of the health crisis seemed to be over for Australia, he saw longer term ­opportunity for the country to increase visitor numbers.

Mr Culbert said it was realistic to believe that Australia, ranked 42nd in the world based on short-term arrivals, could move up ­several notches in a post-coronavirus pandemic world. “I think there’s a huge opportunity because of the way we’ve managed the virus,” he said.

“There are very few countries that have done as good a job as us, and we will be seen as one of the safest countries in the world. I think we need to start thinking about how do we promote that to increase our market share.”

An additional 1 million to 2 million visitors a year would add $12bn to the economy, Mr Culbert said.

“There’s a massive opportunity there and the same goes for international students,” he said.

“We currently rank fifth in the world in terms of market share for international students. If we were able to boost numbers by 10 per cent, which isn’t such a stretch … given the US and the UK are number one and two, that would deliver almost $4bn of value to the economy.”

In his speech to shareholders “attending” the virtual AGM via webcast, Mr Culbert said 2019 was a tough year for Australia’s biggest tourism gateway but he would gladly swap those challenges for what they were seeing in 2020.

“Overall we were pleased with our performance in 2019 but that seems a long time ago,” he said.

“(In 2020) international traffic is down 38.9 per cent year to date and is down 97.9 per cent in the month of May to date. Domestic traffic is down 37.4 per cent year to date and 97.4 per cent so far for the month of May.” An additional $850m of debt had been raised to increase Sydney Airport’s liquidity to $2.7bn, made up of cash, undrawn bank facilities and a $600m US private placement bond market issuance due to settle next month.

Mr Culbert said the airport’s strong balance sheet would hold it in good stead to weather COVID-19 travel restrictions until the end of next year.

“It’s so hard to say how long it will be before we see a full recovery, (but) what we’re focused on is the pathway to recovery,” he said. Sydney Airport shares closed up 1.6 per cent on the back of the AGM, at $5.68, still a long way from their pre-pandemic high of $9.30.