By Mansi Saxena
This weekend, spend an evening at the Sydney Opera House and observe the people around you.
You can’t miss it; it’s a sea of different faces. Chinese, Indians, Koreans, Vietnamese, Pakistanis walking by in families, couples, young student groups. It’s fascinating to see so many different cultures within your camera frame at the backdrop of an Australian landmark. That’s the beauty of Australia, the friendly multicultural shore!
Tourism in Australia is a reflection of this multiculturalism. Over 6.6 million visitors arrived in Australia for the year ending May 2013, marking an 8.2% growth over the same period the previous year.
$5.1 billion contribution to tourism and growing
Prosperity in the Asian countries is the leading contributor to this growth; Asian markets (China, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia and India) spent a total of $10.3 billion in international expenditure and Mainland China alone contributed $5.1 billion to this total.
Visiting family and relatives an important contributor
Their reasons for visiting Australia are holiday, seeing friends and relatives, business, employment and education. In fact, VFR is the 2nd highest contributor to the international visitor expenditure for travellers from the Asian markets. Chinese travellers listed Australia as their number one travel destination.
The idea of cheap and cheerful Chinese is wrong
Among others, property hunting is becoming another reason to visit Australia. They come here, fall in love and buy a home. They might spend the day with their family at the Opera house and second day going through property inspections.
Asia is closer to Australia than ever before and tourism is just one piece of the pie. There are many far-reaching effects of this boom, affecting various other industries directly or indirectly!
As the former executive of Tourism Australia, Andrew McEvoy, said: “China is our fastest growing and highest yielding market. So the idea of cheap and cheerful Chinese is wrong. China will be a 1 million person and $10 billion market for Australia by 2020.”