Community
5 April, 2024
International tourism numbers slowly clawing back
THE first full year of post-pandemic International Visitor Survey figures show overseas tourist numbers to the Far North are recovering, with visitor expenditure for 2023 back to $831.3 million, but down 19.1 per cent on 2019.
A Tourism Tropical North Queensland spokeswoman said visitor numbers were down 43.4 per cent on 2019 because of the region’s reliance on holiday visitors which make up 396,000 of the total 458,000 visitors.
“Business visitors are starting to help increase these figures with an increase of 14.2 per cent to 18,000,” she said.
“North America is our strongest market with 95,000 visitors, down about 20 per cent from 2019.
“However, their length of stay is helping to grow visitor nights with the 522,000 nights from US visitors alone, down just 5.3 per cent.
“Visiting friends and relatives helped to boost the UK market by three per cent to 74,000, while the 67,000 visitors from Japan are down 40.5 per cent.
“There were 33,000 visitors from Germany, followed by 30,000 from New Zealand, 17,000 from France and 12,000 from Scandinavia.
“This year TTNQ’s activity in our key international markets has been intense as we utilise the federal government’s $15 million Tropical North Queensland International Tourism Recovery Program to rebuild our $1 billion international industry.
“We currently have 87 confirmed campaigns running internationally this financial year with the first eight campaigns achieving $10 million in visitor expenditure.”
On the domestic front expenditure was down over the year (decreasing 14.4 per cent to $3.8 billion).
“This was both because there were less visitors to the region (down 9.5 per cent to 2.3 million) and these visitors shortened their length of stay average (down 0.6 nights to 5.1 nights),” a Tourism and Events Queensland report said.
