IF MY recent trip to Melbourne for the Australian Tourism Exchange (ATE) proved anything, it’s that Australia’s tourism bodies are pedalling harder and faster to beckon travellers than they ever have before.
ATE24 attracted a record number of buyers and sellers to the key tourism event, including an impressive 60 first-time sellers and 109 first-time buyers.
The main floor of the country’s largest B2B tourism event is a tad manic, the air of competition between the states and territories is palpable, as buyers meet with tourism sellers from around the country through a rigorous speed-dating style of networking.
It really is an impressive pace everyone sets during the event, and rightly so, as it is considered the centrepiece opportunity for selling Australia as a destination at home and abroad.
However, this year is really about focusing on the country’s overseas visitors, which still more than four years after the pandemic, is yet to reach the magical milestone of 2019 levels.
To open the event, Tourism Minister Don Farrell proudly announced that he was confident of hitting 2019 tourist volumes before the end of the year, based on current projections.
Speaking with TB on the sidelines of ATE24, Tourism Australia CEO Phillipa Harrison said part of the challenge is ensuring that as an industry, the country is ‘export-ready’ to go into battle against other competitor markets.
“Australian suppliers are more and more focused on the international market and being export-ready, which means being fully prepared to sell to international markets,” Harrison said.
“That has been a bit of an evolution, there are certain hurdles that you need to meet when you’re export-ready, but more and more states are doing great work in bringing along their industry to get them to that point.
“There’s now a lot more of industry who are ready to sell internationally and there really is a lot more demand for Australia out there as well,” she added.
While the data suggests Australia is on most of the world’s bucket list for a holiday – we are regularly in the top three destinations globally – our remote geography and relative expense compared to some other long-haul markets results in some attrition to travellers’ aspirations.
“When it comes to actually getting on a plane and coming here, that’s where we lose people along the funnel and that’s also why shows like ATE24 are so important, because it helps with getting people down the funnel and converting that demand there is for Australia into actual business,” Harrison explained.
While there are many obvious benefits of hosting events like ATE24, expensive airfares and a lack of airline capacity in and out of the country have clearly hampered inbound numbers.
Thankfully, the grim picture has improved quite significantly for air connectivity over recent months, which the experts keep saying will in turn ultimately bring down the price of air tickets to levels that will greatly incentivise Australian visitation.
But the elephant in the room still remains, where are the Chinese visitors?
While source markets like India, Japan and South Korea are all surging, the former number one tourist market for Australia has been sluggish to get off the blocks in similar numbers since borders between the two countries have reopened.
Tourism Australia has not counted its chickens on this front either, investing plenty of resources into marketing to Chinese nationals and making flying visits to show off Ruby the Kangaroo in many of the country’s largest cities.
For all of that work though, visitors from China to Australia have only recovered to around half of what it was in 2019, but when I put this to TA’s chief, Harrison was quick to hose down any suggestions the market won’t rebound to its former glory days of five or six years ago.
“We had a really great Chinese New Year, which is our peak period, and we jumped up to about 75% of pre-COVID capacity and aviation capacity is sitting at about 90%,” Harrison noted.
“We’ve got everything in place and we’re seeing [the Chinese market] grow month-on-month – so it’s just a matter of time from our point of view.”
Harrison also pointed out that given the delay in border openings ordered by the Chinese Government, the recovery trajectory is roughly where the tourism body predicted it would be anyway.
“The delay meant that air capacity took a while to come back…agencies not selling Australia for a long time takes a while to build back their product knowledge…and so we’re on the right path with that now,” she said.
Many tourism operators (and outbound operators to China for that matter) felt a slight chill when Qantas recently announced it would be dumping Shanghai services from July, and while Harrison conceded losing routes is never a great scenario, she contended the ripple effect would only be small.
“It was only five flights in 120 a week, so I don’t think that it will impact the inbound market in a material way,” she insisted.
While not called out specifically in any ATE presentation, it was notable that China had by far and away the most buyers present at the event outside of those based in Australia.
There were roughly twice as many buyers from China (151) than mainland Europe (76) for example, with many in the industry hoping the large delegation will signal the start of a less glacial recovery rate of Chinese tourists to our shores.
However, what isn’t always quantifiable within the tourism context at events like ATE is the overlay of diplomatic and geopolitical tensions which still shroud the relationship between the two nations.
While the Albanese Government continues to work on thawing bonds after a disastrous disintegration of rapport under former PM Scott Morrison, it remains an ongoing challenge to return to a 2019 footing.
It was only two months ago that China announced it would be lifting tough wine tariffs on Aussie exporters, adding to a growing list of sectors which are no longer feeling China’s wrath, such as barley and coal producers.
But the effects of the fallout is still being felt at a societal level in both countries, which no doubt is placing a dampener on travel in both directions.
At the height of the diplomatic fracas over the origins of COVID-19, the Chinese Government was telling its citizens not to travel to Australia because they were at risk of being attacked by racist locals, and while the propaganda machine has been dialled down in recent times, many Chinese residents may still feel a residual inclination that Australia is not the welcoming country it once was.
Some Australian travellers are also expressing reservations about travelling to China in light of some dubious detentions of foreign nationals by the government over the past couple of years.
Trust will be that slightly nebulous ingredient that will need to be topped up for two-way travel to get back to what it was, and for that to happen geopolitical tensions will no doubt need to cool – especially in the Pacific.
While we in the industry can do little to control political relationships, as the old Chinese proverb goes, the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.
So I guess there’s not much more we can all do but keep on walking towards recovery in the hope that one day we can run once again.
