Arrivals and Departures data slightly better for QLD

Posted on May 15, 2018 by Pete Faulkner - QLD, Tourism, Uncategorized

The release today of the short term arrivals and departures data from the ABS for March shows international arrivals to Australia moving ahead at a healthy lick…up 9.0% from a year ago and up 6.9% for the past 12 months totalled. Residents leaving for short term breaks are also up strongly (up 5.9% for the annual data).

Arrivals from China (so vital for the Far North) are still growing although at a significantly reduced pace. According to the Trend data arrivals from China were up 6.8% from a year ago (the slowest pace of growth since Feb 2010). As we pointed out last month (see here), the Chinese data has been disturbed by the Chinese New Year so coming months will show us the how the longer term trend is settling down. Nevertheless, as the chart below demonstrates, things have slowed markedly in recent months.

Queensland has done somewhat better in this release when it comes to considering the data of state of intended stay. 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 some significant revisions to back-months which makes what had been a sorry story for the Sunshine State looking somewhat rosier. At last some of the gap that had opened up with other states (particularly Victoria) has closed slightly in March. Nevertheless annual Trend growth to Queensland is only running at 4.7% which is better than only NT (+0.4%) and WA (+0.8%). NSW (+7.9%) and Victoria (+6.5%) continue to do better than us.

The star performer is, once again, Tasmania which sees Trend annual growth of 32.2%. On this measure of state of intended stay Tasmania has seen annual Trend numbers more than double since August 2014!