International travel from Australia continues to surge with new data showing travel abroad hit a major milestone in December.
According to recently released Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures for overseas departures and arrivals, outbound Australian travel surpassed 1.5 million passenger movements in December 2022.
While the exact figure (1,523,070) for December departures is provisional, it still shows a monthly increase of nearly 30 per cent on November 2022 numbers, which were confirmed at 1.18 million departures (itself an increase of more than 10 per cent on October trips).
With the magic number, December 2022 departures moved to almost 70 per cent of December 2019 levels, which totalled 2.24 million movements.
Australian borders fully reopened on 21 February 2022 after they were closed for nearly two years.
In the first month after borders were reopened, there were just 335,240 international departures. This number has grown incrementally each month, with the exception of August and October, when numbers dropped slightly.
When it comes to inbound travel, provisionally there were 1,269,150 international arrivals into Australia in December 2022, which was slightly up on the 1,189,920 arrivals in November.
Sydney Airport tops 3 million passengers
Meanwhile, Sydney Airport announced it hit a milestone of its own in December 2022, recording more than 3 million passenger movements in a month for the first time since February 2020.
According to the airport, 3,093,000 travellers passed through Australia’s busiest hub in December, with 1,157,000 of those international passengers.
This was down 27.9 per cent on the December 2019 figure, but the continued rise shows travel is getting back to where it was pre-pandemic.
Sydney Airport CEO Geoff Culbert said that despite surpassing the 3 million mark for passenger movements, “the recovery is by no means over”.
“There is significantly more work to do to rebuild overseas travel, with international passenger traffic still well behind pre-pandemic levels and lower flight numbers,” he said.
“Australia needs to unlock more capacity, and quickly, if we want to see a sustained recovery for our tourism, education, and export industries.
“There are some positive signs, with the number of flights to and from China rapidly increasing following that crucial border reopening and All Nippon Airways (ANA) announcing that it is doubling its Sydney to Tokyo flights to twice daily from late March.”
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