Australia has a growing international visitor market supported by a strong domestic travel base:
Source: Tourism Research Australia
For the year ending March 2019, strong growth was reported across most of Australia’s major markets.
China, the US, the UK, New Zealand and Japan were the five major markets that contributed just over half (A$23.9 billion) of the total spend for the year. China alone accounts for more than one-quarter of total international spend ($12 billion) - three times that of the next highest market, the US. India continued to be the strongest performing market, with spend up 12% to $1.7 billion.
Tourism 2020 is a whole-of-government and industry long-term strategy to build the resilience and competitiveness of Australia’s tourism industry and grow its economic contribution. It focuses on improving the industry’s performance and competitiveness by pursuing new opportunities for growth and addressing supply-side factors.
The Tourism 2020 goal is to achieve more than $115 billion in overnight spend by 2020 (up from $70 billion in 2009).
The graph below showcases how we're tracking against the Tourism 2020 goal.
Australian hotels have an extremely stable demand base. Demand across Australia’s hotel market has continued to sustain continuous annual growth, despite the short term impact of one-off events like SARS, the Asian Economic Crisis in 2007 and the September 11 terrorism attacks.