In the year to June, 1.2 million visitors from New Zealand entered Australia, which was up 49,000 on the number from the previous year, according to data from Tourism Research Australia.
The second-largest international visitor flow in this year was from China with 1.06 million visitors, up 196,000 on the previous year. On current rates of growth China will cruise past the Kiwi market early next year.
By the end of this year, Australia will have direct flight connections into 15 mainland cities in China. The smallest of these cities is Fuzhou. But There are 15 bigger cities in China than Fuzhou with bigger middle-class markets that remain untapped in that there are no direct flights to Australia.
The most significant structural shift in the Australian tourism market over the past decade has been a fourfold increase in Chinese visitor numbers. This shift alone has added 783,000 extra visitors to the Australian market.
The roughly one million Chinese visitors this year could well be two million or more by the end of the decade and more again by the mid-2020s.
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