China’s direct flights fuel our visitor boom

A significant cultural event took place a few months ago. At some point in May the number of visitors arriving in Australia from New Zealand was surpassed by the number arriving from China, ending a two-decade reign by the Kiwisaurus.

It wasn’t a meteorite from outer space that killed off the visiting Kiwi supremacy. It was the rise of an unrelenting number of incoming flights from Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Hong Kong, Foshan, Qingdao, Chongqing, Xi’an, Hangzhou, Kunming, Shenzhen, Wuhan and Changsha. It is not all that long ago, relatively speaking, that the only direct flight between Australia and China was via Hong Kong. Four new Chinese cities were connected with direct flights to Australian cities last year alone.

The Kiwi routes to Australia from Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Queenstown just can’t keep up. Four years ago Wuhan, a city of eight million in central China, opened direct flights to Coolangatta. That’s not for the Gold Coasters to explore Wuhan, as tempting as that may be. It was for the Wuhanis to have a holiday. Middle-class China wants to go on holiday.

In August 2011 Australia attracted 496,000 visitors from overseas; in August last year, according to census 2016 figures, this number was 765,000. The China component had lifted from 48,000 to 127,000 across this period. In crude terms, Australia now attracts 79,000 extra Chinese visitors a month compared with just six years ago. Another way to look at this is to say the number of

Chinese visitors in the month of August grew by 13,000 each year since 2011. We could connect four new cities with direct flights between China and Australia every year for a generation and still be connecting into Chinese cities that are bigger than Adelaide.

The census counts visitors as people who spent census night in Australia and who do not intend staying for 12 months. International students are counted as residents, not visitors. The visitor age profile shows a peak in the 16-year-old exchange-student market, another peak in the 23-year-old backpacker market and another peak in the 60-year-old baby boomer market. And in all cases the past five years have been a period of significant growth in overseas visitors. More flights means more visitors.

The census counted 315,000 overseas visitors on census night, up 96,000 on the 2011 figure, which in turn was up 13,000 on the 2006 figure. If the overseas visitor population was concentrated into a single location it would form Australia’s ninth biggest city, falling between Canberra (population 429,000) and the Sunshine Coast (308,000), but it is growing much faster than both of these cities.

The largest concentration of overseas visitors was in Sydney, where about one in four (or 82,000) visitors spent census night. Melbourne is Australia’s second most popular location, accommodating 65,000 visitors. Then comes Queensland, generally accommodating 53,000 visitors outside Brisbane (with 30,000 visitors) and mostly in places such as the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast and Cairns.

The census shows precisely where within our capital cities overseas visitors spent census night. This market congregates in the CBDs, no doubt in hotel accommodation but also in inner suburbs such as Sydney’s Waterloo, Melbourne’s Carlton, Brisbane’s St Lucia and Perth’s Bentley.

Other visitor hot spots cluster farther afield in places such as Melbourne’s Glen Waverley and Box Hill, Sydney’s Ryde and Parramatta, and Brisbane’s Sunnybank Hills. Australia’s clustering visitors are corporates as well as friends and relatives of students.

In some ways our rising visitor population is a spin-off benefit of our international student program. Yes, international students pay fees and thereby subsidise local students, but they also stimulate an overseas visitor market. Family members, most likely parents, come out to see how their kids are doing. Another market would be friends and relatives visiting recently arrived immigrants clustering in places such as Melbourne’s Tarneit.

We don’t ask too many questions of overseas visitors other than their age and sex and, of course, their postcode. But we do ask visitors their marital status. Here’s what these questions reveal:

Australia is visited by more females than males. The split is 56:44, which translates into 35,000 more female than male visitors on census night. We must be perceived as a safe place to visit by sole female travellers. The bulk of the extra female visitors (13,000) have never married, which suggests a disproportionate number of female backpackers and exchange students. Again, this would occur only if Australia were regarded as a safe, desirable and probably exotic destination. That’d be us. We’re exotic.

Our overseas visitor population also comprised 9000 more married women than married men, 3000 more divorced women than divorced men and 10,000 more widowed women than widowed men. I think that much of the 60-year peak in the visitor market is comprised of women — mothers mostly — visiting their son or daughter studying in Sydney or Melbourne.

So there you have it. We have never attracted as many overseas visitors as we are today. This isn’t so much a consequence of a prawn-on-the-barbie or a where-the-bloody-hell-are-you advertising campaign. It’s much likelier to be an associated response to Australia’s success as a destination for international students. Plus the sheer volume of new flight connections, especially with China, is stimulating and transforming the Australian tourism industry.

Bernard Salt is a special adviser to KPMG Australia; research by Simon Kuestenmacher.