Travel industry’s struggle to reignite international tourism laid out in new data

The tourism industry’s struggle to convince visitors to ‘Come and Say G’day’ has been highlighted by new overseas arrivals data.

Arrivals at Sydney International Airport, off a Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong. Picture: NCA Newswire / Gaye Gerard

The tourism industry’s struggle to convince international visitors to “come and say g’day” has been highlighted by new overseas arrivals data showing even New Zealanders are not rushing back to Australia.

Bureau of Statistics’ figures showed short-term international arrivals slipped to 56 per cent of 2019 levels in January, down from 60 per cent in December.

In contrast, the number of Australians heading overseas remained steady at just under 80 per cent of 2019 figures.

Although New Zealand was our biggest source of overseas visitors with 65,480, numbers were still 30 per cent shy of what they were pre-Covid-19 at 92,670.

The sluggish return of New Zealanders was also reflected in airline data, showing passenger loads as low as 65 per cent on flights across the Tasman.

The US and UK markets appeared to be recovering faster, at 73 per cent and 75 per cent of January 2019 data respectively, while India was back to 79 per cent.

At the other end of the scale, Chinese visitors were at a mere 10 per cent of pre-Covid levels in January, even as borders reopened in mainland China.

Other countries lagging well behind pre-pandemic levels, were Singapore at 60 per cent of January 2019 figures, South Korea at 61 per cent and Hong Kong 62 per cent.

CommSec chief economist Craig James said the statistics showed people were still reluctant to travel.

“Tourism numbers are still a long way from ‘normal’ levels before the pandemic,” Mr James said.

“In fact short-term visitor numbers are half what they were four years ago. Travel-dependent stocks and sectors will find business challenging for most of 2023.”

Travel industry leaders pointed the figure at constrained airline capacity as the main reason for the slow rebound in international visitors.

Experience Co chief executive, John O’Sullivan, a former Tourism Australia managing director, said it was always going to be a challenge to return to 2019 levels effectively from zero.

“Tourism Australia have got an incredibly difficult job ahead of them — they’ve got to reconvince the customer in a market that hasn’t been able to travel for three years and has probably been doing a lot of domestic travel, to come to Australia,” Mr O’Sullivan said.

“It’s incredibly competitive and I don’t think we get that here. Just as Tourism Australia is spending many millions of dollars on ‘Come and Say G’Day’ every other national tourism organisation around the world is doing exactly the same.”

He said the recovery was always going to be “a bit lumpy” rather than steady month-on-month growth but he was confident as airline capacity returned, so would international visitors.

“Aviation capacity is such a key driver for that international visitation, and we haven’t seen the Chinese airlines really come back online yet,” Mr O’Sullivan said.

“The Chinese market is a market that moves at scale and it moves very quickly so I think you will see that once the capacity comes back and once the student population comes back again.”

The easing of the requirement for Chinese visitors to Australia to have a negative Covid test pre-departure was also expected to stimulate travel.

Effective from March 11, the federal government decision ended the testing requirement introduced on January 5 for residents of China, Hong Kong and Macau.

Australian Airports Association chief executive James Goodwin said it was a “sound and sensible” move.

“Removing the testing requirements is an important step to normalising international travel,” Mr Goodwin said.

“This will be a confidence boost for those planning to travel to Australia at a time when the aviation and tourism sectors are still rebuilding.”

The Bureau of Statistics’ data came ahead of Tourism Australia’s annual industry conference “Destination Australia” in Sydney on Thursday.

Compered by television personality Karl Stefanovic, the conference was expected to provide a detailed update of industry progress, with topics such as “developing a tourism product accessible to all”.