Is India the New China for Tourist-Hungry Destinations?
Photo Credit: A traveler lounges in the private terrace of The Louise, Barossa Valley, Australia. Australia has become too dependent on Chinese inbound travelers, and now it's reckoning with a tourist slump. Luxury Lodges of Australia
Skift Take
India is becoming the boat that lifts Asia-Pacific destinations that have become too dependent on China outbound travel, which is sputtering. Australia is a good example of this.
The risk of overly relying on China’s outbound travelers is surfacing again, this time in the land Down Under where Chinese arrivals have hit the wall, as our Australia contributor Martin Kelly writes in the report below.
Like many destinations that have massaged growth from China to the point it becomes their main source of arrivals — for some, by far — it’s a reckoning that shouldn’t come as a surprise, yet it does.
Australia should have seen it coming. A 17 percent growth year-over-year in the last 10 years is unsustainable. Besides, it can no longer count itself the first Western destination for Chinese as, in that period, countries from Switzerland to South America have all been courting mainland arrivals with heavy marketing and easier visa processing. Besides, the world has shrunk, with more direct flights linking contin
