It’s fast becoming a golden age for domestic travel. And what makes its success the more sweeter is that it comes after the darkest days for Aussie tourism during the pandemic. The numbers back this assertion.
According to Tourism Research Australia’s (TRA) recently released National Visitor Survey (NVS), Aussie holidaymakers spent a whopping $101.3 billion (too many zeros to write) on overnight vacations within Australia in 2022. That figure is an increase of 25 per cent on numbers for (pre-pandemic) 2019.
In total, we spent 399.7 million total nights away on 108.2 million overnight trips for the year.
While these figures were down slightly (-4 per cent and -8 per cent respectively) on 2019 numbers, it doesn’t take away from the fact that we are spending significantly more (+$20.6 billion) while we are travelling.
All of this equals happy days – and food for thought – for local tourism operators.
“With the recovery of the tourism industry expected to be led by the domestic sector, there are opportunities for operators to target their offerings to home-grown visitors,” TRA says in its report.
While intrastate (in other words, local) trips recovered more quickly than interstate holidays over the year, spend grew for both, with intrastate expenditure up 22 per cent (to $45.6 billion) and interstate expenditure growing 29 per cent (to $55.7 billion).
When it comes to where we travelled, regional areas were the big winners last year, with overnight spend rising a massive 35 per cent (to $56.4 billion), compared to a still impressive 15 per cent increase (to $44.8 billion) for major city vacations.
The surprising biggest spenders
Per state, Northern Territory led expenditure, with residents spending an average $1,867 per overnight trip, followed by Tasmania ($1,161), Queensland ($1,085), Western Australia ($957), South Australia ($850), NSW ($810) Victoria ($775) and the ACT ($739), which was the only state/territory to travel more for VFR (visiting friends and relatives) than for holidays.
While international visitor numbers lagged behind pre-pandemic numbers in 2022, international visitor expenditure is expected to exceed pre-pandemic levels next year and arrivals are expected to reach 9.5 million (2019 total) by 2025.
By 2027, TRA predicts that 11 million international visitors will hit our shores, led by travellers from India. TRA predicts domestic and international visitor expenditure to reach $227.7 billion by 2027.
Tourism Research Australia is a branch within Austrade and is considered Australia’s leading provider of tourism intelligence across both international and domestic markets.
TRA’s recent Tourism Businesses Report 2017-2022, revealed there were 8,647 travel agency and tour operator services based in Australia in June last year.
