Short term arrivals continue to grow; QLD continues to underperform

Posted on February 19, 2018 by Pete Faulkner - NSW, QLD, Tourism, Uncategorized, VIC

Today’s release of short term arrivals and departures data from the ABS for Dec show arrivals grew by 4% (seasonally adjusted) and 5.8% (Trend) on the same time a year ago. Growth from China continues to be strong, up 10.1% for the year (Trend).

Short term departures of residents grew by just 1.8% for the year.

However, when we consider the data for the state of intended stay the picture confirms the ongoing under-performance of Queensland. This data is presented by the ABS only in its unadjusted, original format so we prefer to use the Conus Trend series. Here we see that Queensland was the only state or territory that saw a decline in numbers over the year; monthly Trend data has now fallen in Queensland for each of the last 9 months. The Trend year/year changes across all the states and territories in Dec were;

NSW +2.9%
VIC +6.2%
QLD -4.1%
SA +33.8%
WA +11.8%
TAS +34.6%
NT +8.1%
ACT +100.9%

As we have been saying for a long time, Queensland is struggling to keep up with other states in terms of its attractiveness to international visitors (see here). This has been demonstrated by the Tourism Research Australia International Visitors Survey over many quarters and today’s ABS data merely confirms it. Victoria took over second spot from Queensland back in early 2014 and the gap between the two has widen significantly ever since.

Note: The ABS notes “Data quality issues have been identified with the capture and coding of state or territory of stay/residence from incoming passenger cards from July 2017 onwards. Data from the cards is currently being re-processed to correct these issues and will be re-supplied to the ABS. Once this is complete, ABS will revise OAD statistics from July 2017 onwards. Until the data is revised, users should exercise caution when comparing statistics for state or territory of stay/residence for this period with previous periods.” We should therefore be wary of drawing conclusions based simply on this data set. Nevertheless, the confirmation of the general trend of underperformance of Queensland by the TRA data suggest that while nominal levels might see some revision the overarching story remains intact.