The Chinese tourism market in Australia is booming, as a seventh airline from the country is set to launch flights down under.
Chinese tourists have already overtaken New Zealanders as the biggest visitors to Australia, with a study from Australian Bureau of Statistics reporting an 11 per cent growth rate year on year in May.
According to The ABC, Tourism Australia Managing Director John O’Sullivan added to the findings that more than 1.2 million people from mainland China visited Australia last year.
“This is a market that moves at speed and scale like we’ve never seen before,” O’Sullivan said.
“By 2020, we think that 42 per cent of all visitors to Australia will come from mainland China.”
“We predict in the next year, Chinese visitors will overtake our current number one market, New Zealand,” he added.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald, it is predicted the number of travellers from mainland China into Australia will triple by 2026, to roughly 3.3 million tourists a year.
If those figures weren’t convincing enough, one of the country’s biggest airlines, Beijing Capital Airlines, will now begin offering direct flights between Sydney and Qingdao.
Home of Tsingtao Beer, travellers will be able to fly to into Sydney from Qingdao four times a week.
“China remains a hugely important market for us,” O’Sullivan said.
“You can now fly direct to Australia from no less than 18 different cities in mainland China.
“Many of these new flights are from China’s secondary cities such as Kunming, Hangzhou, Wuhan and now Qingdao, effectively opening up parts of China that are, as yet, largely untapped.”
